Little Big Man

There is an endless supply of white men. There has always been a limited number of human beings. Little Big Man is directed by Arthur Penn and written by Calder Willingham. It stars Dustin Hoffman, Faye Dunaway, Martin Balsam, Chief Dan George and Richard Mulligan. Arthur Penn's Little Big Man is tagged with many filmic sayings, be it revisionist or anti Western etc, it's a picture much cherished for its oddly quirky slyness. Allegorical movies are now in this day and age ten a penny, but back in 1970, with the Vietnam War in vivid focus, that wasn't the case. Marking this out as a provocative and ambitious venture. Penn has fun debunking and poking fun at the myths of the Old West via an array of pungent characters that Jack Crabb (Hoffman) meets in his lifetime. All of which leads to the question hanging in the air, that of is Jack Crabb the sole white man survivor of Custer's last stand at Little Big Horn? The portrayal of the Indians, here the Cheyenne, is superlative by way of the fact that they are the sensible spiritual race, the whites on the other hand are emotionally corrupt in comparison. It gets a little heavy handed at times and really half an hour could have been shaved off the running time and still the pic would have had the same effect. But great performances, the quirks and the potent thematics make for a fine piece of film making. 7/10

This is quite a fun series of escapades told by way of a flashback interview from the ostensibly 121 year old "Crabb" (Dustin Hoffman) who is the last survivor of George Custer's ill-fated battle at the Little Big Horn. His not entirely convinced interviewer asks him about his lively life and we embark on his times as a white man who became an Indian before being "rescued" again before some toing and froing between them all set against the pioneering culture of the settlers encroaching on the ancient territories of the natives and of the ensuing hostilities that culminated with "Yellow Hair" Custer's calamitous campaign against the Sioux. Along the way we meet an array of interesting characters like "Wild" Bill Hickok (Jeff Corey), the force of nature that is "Mrs. Pendrake" (Faye Dunaway) as well as the dapper, slightly foppish, General himself (Richard Mulligan) but it's really the sagely old chief (Chief Dan George) whose stoicism in the face of the advancing of modern times is both engaging to watch and poignant as he begins to symbolise both a disappearing and an emerging way of life. There's loads of room for romantic interludes, the odd bit of bad news and by the end of this, I was starting to believe that however implausible many of his recounted adventures might have seemed - who knows, maybe he's really who he claims to be? It's a bit long, but most of the time the quirkiness of the story and it's pace carry it along entertainingly as a simplistic pastiche of US history that Hoffmann holds together really quite well, even if his characterisation as a gunslinger is maybe just a bridge too far. It has dated, and personally I'd have liked to have seen more of the ancillary characters developed a bit more - it'd have been great with the likes of Strother Martin, Jack Elam and Walter Brennan in there too, but it's still well worth a watch.

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John Chard

CinemaSerf