Dances with Wolves (1990) on Netflix
PG-1319903h 1mAdventureDramaWestern
Wounded in the Civil War, Lieutenant John J. Dunbar asks for a frontier posting and finds Fort Sedgwick deserted. His Sioux neighbors try to take his horse, and he wants peace.
- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb8.0/10313,236 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes87%
Trailer
Plot summary
In 1863, Lieutenant John J. Dunbar is wounded at St. David's Field in Tennessee. A surgeon plans to take his leg, so Dunbar rides out before the Confederate lines without a weapon, meaning to die. He survives, keeps the leg, is given the horse Cisco, and asks for a posting on the frontier. At Fort Hays, the mentally ill commander Major Fambrough sends him to Fort Sedgwick, his farthest outpost, and does not tell anyone where he has gone. Dunbar travels with Timmons, a mule-wagon provisioner, and reaches a deserted fort, which he rebuilds while writing down what he sees in his diary. His Sioux neighbors try to take his horse. Wanting peace, he seeks out their camp and meets Stands With A Fist, a white woman taken in as a child by Kicking Bird, the tribe's medicine man.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Dances with Wolves (1990)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Oglala Lakota activist and actor Russell Means criticized the film's accuracy: a woman taught the actors the Lakota language, which has male-gendered and female-gendered forms, so some of the Natives and Kevin Costner were speaking in the feminine way, which had Means and his friends laughing.
- Members of the Lakota Sioux Nation held a ceremony in Washington, D.C. to honor Costner, McDonnell and Wilson; Albert Whitehat, a Lakota elder who served as a cultural adviser on the film, adopted Costner into his family, and two other families adopted McDonnell and Wilson.
- Author and screenwriter Michael Blake said that Stands With A Fist was actually based upon Cynthia Ann Parker, the white girl captured by Comanches and mother of Quanah Parker.
- Several studios turned the project down because the Western genre was no longer popular and the script was too long; after it languished at Nelson Entertainment and Island Pictures, Costner and Jim Wilson sold the foreign rights in several countries and raised enough to go into pre-production.
- It is one of only four Westerns to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, the other three being Cimarron in 1931, Unforgiven in 1992 and No Country for Old Men in 2007.
- Released on home video in the United States in September 1991 by Orion Home Video, it beat the rental record set by Ghost at 649,000 units, and in 1992 a McDonald's promotion let customers buy a VHS copy if they also purchased food.
- Costner dropped out of the 1990 submarine thriller The Hunt for Red October in favour of making Dances With Wolves instead.
