Back in the late ’60s early 70’s, when the hippies seemed to be all over the place with their long hair, funky mustaches, and lack of cleanliness the American Indian was considered THE Hippie. And they took drugs, too. Hung out in sweat lodges, and just kinda had a grand old time.
LITTLE BIG MAN opened in 1970 and told the white audience that American Indians were more than the cliche. Granted it took a white man, Dustin Hoffman as Jack Crabb, to let us know this ’cause Lawd knows we can’t just have a movie about American Indians without a white movie star telling us how bad we mistreated/misunderstood the American Indian. Oops. Channeling Spike Lee for a moment. (By the way, the book by Thomas Berger is much more detailing in breaking down this romantic notion of the American Indian; the movie just skims the surface at times so pick up the book if you get a chance.)
Anyway…LITTLE BIG MAN really is a good movie. I can have a field day with the simplicity inherent in its depictions (and, at times, I think some outright lies) of American Indians and the Old West, but, at the time, there were few movies that tried to treat the subject of white man/indian relations with some semblance of honesty. A MAN CALLED HORSE, released the same year, also did this, but LITTLE BIG MAN had higher aspirations. It not only wanted to dispel the myths of Hollywood American Indians, but also to dispel the myths of the Hollywood Western.
So we have nebbish Dustin Hoffman playing the lead role, Richard Mulligan as a Custer who is both egomaniacal AND ignorant, and Chief Dan George as Old Lodge Skins, the leader of his tribe who is both funny and wise without being pretentious and solemn about it. Actually, he’s just a bit nuts, the old coot. But he plays the chief as his own man instead of the caricature that Hollywood gave us in the past.
SPOILERS: If you haven’t seen LITTLE BIG MAN, it’s basically an episodic movie where Jack Crabb is captured by the Cheyenne and raised by them, only to be re-captured, so to speak, by the white man and raised by religious folk, played by a hot and bothered Faye Dunaway. Crabb becomes a snake-oil salesman, a gunfighter, a store owner, a drunk, an Indian scout, and I think he drives a taxi, too.
Arthur Penn, the director, deliberately set out to overturn the myths, and he did a great job. All the performances are wonderful, the sets, blahblahblah, you get the picture. I think at times, the movie strives too much for comedy and overreaching, sometimes slipping in its depictions of its characters—Mulligan’s turns as Custer can be tiresome and one wonders why his men just don’t shoot the bastard since we don’t get any real sense of WHY these guys would follow this knucklehead other than the movie tells us it’s Custer.
But there are scenes like Custer’s first attack on the Cheyenne village where the brutality of the massacre is never flinched at; or when Crabb is startled and scared when Wild Bill Hickock shoots someone he doesn’t even know, a confrantation enabled only because Hickock is a gunfighter and the man wanted to make a name for himself; or the end scene where Old Lodge Skins takes Little Big Man with him, to accompany the old man to his death. Old Lodge Skins lies on the ground and proceeds to tell Little Big Man that he will now die. A moment passes as the rain starts to fall and we see the old man blink at the raindrops falling on his face. Little Big Man looks at the old man with love as the old man asks him if he’s still in this world. Little Big Man tells him yes, and Old Lodge Skins says, “I was afraid of that.”
And we’re left with the haunting image of Crabb, now over 120 years-old and recounting his exploits to a historian? reporter? holding his head in his hand as he realizes that he is also still in this world. Great image to end the movie.
Tags: arthur penn, chief dan george, dustin hoffman, little big man, Movies
