Little Big Man

Little Big Man (1970) was director Arthur Penn’s adaptation of the 1964 novel of the same name by Thomas Berger. Georgia writer Calder Willingham wrote the screenplay—he also wrote the script for The Graduate (1967) and for Rambling Rose (1991—he also wrote the novel on which he based the script). It has been thirty years since I read Berger’s novel, and probably thirty-six years since I first saw the film, though I watched it again today for the first time. When it was released a friend of mine was contemptuous of it and felt that it did not do justice to Berger’s novel. I cannot say myself, without rereading the novel, which I remember as somewhat more complex and rich than the film. I also remember that Walt Whitman appeared as a minor character in the novel, as a suitor to Jack Crabbe’s sister. It’s an ill-fated match, since in the novel she is a lesbian and Walt, of course, is homosexual. In the film, her sexual preference is mildly implied but not stated, and Whitman is nowhere to be seen.

The film is the picaresque tale of Jack Crabbe’s life, told by Crabbe at the age of 121. In the nursing home where he lives he speaks into a historian’s tape recorder, telling how his family was slaughtered by Pawnee Indians when he was a boy, how only he and his sister surviving. They are adopted by Cheyenne Indians. Jack in the early course of his life lives as an Indian, is adopted by a missionary, misidentified as a muleskinner by General George R. Custer, runs a store and marries a Swedish woman, marries an Indian woman, serves as a tracker for Custer, is a drunk, a flimflam artist, and so on. He’s also present for the Battle of the Little Big Horn, which he helps cause, and which he survives. The film really covers only the first 30 years or so of his life—the last 90 years it doesn’t deal with at all. Crabbe’s narration is a wonderful exercise in self-invention, confabulation, embellishment, and fictional autobiography. The film is loosely narrated. It does not take on much energy or momentum until mid-way through, though it is always interesting. Its characters are its center—Crabbe himself, along with many others, including his adoptive grandfather Old Lodge Skins, his falsely pious adoptive mother Louise Pendrake, Wild Bill Hickock, General Custer, and a snake oil salesman played by Martin Balsam. Although most of these characters appear prominently in individual episodes, they drift in and out of other episodes and compose the shape-shifting, dreamlike nature of Crabbe’s life story. My recollection is that the film far more explicitly than the novel concerns itself with the attacks of the white American settlers against the Native Americans, and the gradual loss of their culture, but I cannot be sure.

What the film possesses that the novel lacks is the Dustin Hoffman persona. He is a fine actor and is in top form in the film, in which he appeared only three years after The Graduate. As you watch Little Big Man you can’t help thinking that Jack Crabbe is really Benjamin Braddock of the earlier film, and vice versa. You view Jack through the lens of Ben, and through the Jewish New York persona and accent of Hoffman. This gives the film a satiric edge that even the novel lacks, though the novel offers ample satire of its own. Yet this is a dimension of satire that the film doesn’t really need—it’s false satire that doesn’t contribute to the story—Hoffman as Ben as Crabbe. The narration of the story—Crabbe’s narrative voice as interpreted by Hoffman both as an old man and as a much younger one—comes to us through this voice and for me it was disconcerting, though you accept it as one of the conventions of the film.

Chief Dan George as Old Lodge Skins, the adoptive Cheyenne grandfather of Jack Crabbe, is an outstanding feature of the film. Nearly every scene in which he appears is a gem, and his death scene is a classic moment. Yet he is, after all, a stereotype. One can easily see how the film might be criticized for its stereotyping of Native Americans, even at the same time that it romanticizes them. Yet the film also portrays the Indians with respect and shows them as victims of American expansionism. It might not accurately portray them, but at least it does not demonize them nor does it pretend that the westward expansion was some sort of heroic epic process.

Little Big Man was one of a number of revisionist films from the 1960s and 70s that sought to reinvent and reinterpret American history, especially the 19^th century westward expansion and the relationship of the white settlers to the Indians. The revisionist account itself is as far off the mark as the account it replaces, but at least it restores balance.

When I first saw this film in 1970 it absolutely bowled me over. Crabbe’s narration of his early life from his distant vantage point as an old man—isolated from the time and place and people who had once given his life meaning—along with the character of Old Lodge Skins, whom I failed to recognize as a stereotype and instead saw as an embattled and endangered fount of authentic humor and natural wisdom—these were the heart of the film for me. My reaction today was less intense, but the film is still affecting, and with all its faults and contrivances, Hoffman’s narration and his portrayal of Jack Crabbe remain an impressive achievement.