Stubs - Little Big Man

Little Big Man (1970) Starring Dustin Hoffman, Faye Dunaway, Martin Balsam, Richard Mulligan, Chief Dan George, Jeff Corey Directed by Arthur Penn. Screenplay by Calder Willingham Based on the novel Little Big Man by Thomas Berger (New York, 1964). Produced by Stuart Millar. USA Run time: 150 minutes. Color Western, Comedy, Drama

Before there was Forrest Gump’s retelling of the 1960s and 70s through the eyes of a simpleton who just happened to be at the most critical events, there was Little Big Man’s Jack Crabb as a witness to the Indian Wars of the 1860s and 70s.

Interest in making Thomas Berger’s novel into a movie dates back to Tom Laughlin, who would be better known for his roles in the Billy Jack films. But despite Laughlin’s interest, producer-director Arthur Penn bought the rights. Originally set up at MGM, Penn would move the project with him when he formed Stockbridge Productions with Stuart Millar.

With financing from Cinema Center Films, and a budget of $7 million dollars, production lasted 70 days beginning on July 14, 1969. The crew shot on locations in and around Billings, MT, and employed several members of the Crow Nation while working on their reservation. Once photography was completed in Montana, production moved north to the Canadian province of Alberta to shoot twelve days of wintertime sequences near Calgary. However, the area had experienced an unseasonable lack of snow, forcing the production to break in early Dec 1969. Resuming in January 1970, the production had to endure snowfall and faced extreme, sub-zero temperatures.

Dustin Hoffman as the 121-year-old Jack Crabb

The film opens in a hospital where a Historian (William Hickey) is set to interview Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman), who is reportedly 121 years-old. While the Historian is interested in learning about the American Indian experience, Crabb is more interested in discussing his claim to have been the only white survivor of the Battle of Little Big Horn and grabs the mic.

His story opens when Jack is a 10-year-old and his family is migrating west and is attacked by Pawnee Indians, who kill his parents, and a member of a separate tribe takes Jack and his sister Caroline (Carole Androsky) back to his village. Caroline seems almost disappointed that the Indians aren’t interested in her sexually, so she escapes, leaving Jack behind. In the tribe, he is taken under the wings of Old Lodge Skins (Chief Dan George), who treats him like a son.

At an early age, Jack is treated like a son by Old Lodge Skins (Chief Dan George).

Crabb earns the name Little Big Man because of his small stature and his bravery when he saves the life of Younger Bear (Cal Bellini).

Rather than be killed, Jack renounces his Indian upbringing.

However, at the age of 16, when he is about to be killed by a Cavalry soldier, Crabb renounces his Indian background in order to save himself. He is then sent to live with Rev. Silas Pendrake (Thayer Daniel) and his wife Louise (Faye Dunaway). While Silas wants to beat religion into him, Louise is eager to introduce Jack to the pleasures of sex. However, when Jack spies her having sex with the owner of the soda shop, he leaves.

 Louise Pendrake (Faye Dunaway) may be a preacher's wife but she has sex on her mind.

After leaving the Pendrakes, he apprentices with Allardyce T. Merriweather (Martin Balsam), a hawker of patent medicines, aka a snake-oil salesman. After the pair is tarred and feathered by disgruntled customers, led by Jack’s sister Caroline, he leaves Merriweather’s employ.

Allardyce T. Merriweather (Martin Balsam) is always scheming.

With Caroline’s help, Jack tries his hand as a gunslinger. Since he doesn’t drink liquor, he is known as the "Soda Pop Kid." One day, he becomes friends with Wild Bill Hickok (Jeff Corey) but loses his taste for gunfighting when he watches Hickok kill another man in self-defense. He decides to give up gunslinging and as a result he loses Caroline.

During his short stint as a gunfighter, Jack befriends Wild Bill Hickok (Jeff Corey).

He decides to settle down and marries Olga (Kelly Jean Peters), a Swedish woman, and with a partner Jack opens a general store. However, his partner cheats him and he loses the business. Following the advice of Gen. George Custer (Richard Mulligan), he decides to head West to seek his fortune.  However, during the trip, Olga is abducted by the Indians.

Jack attempts to settle down by marrying Olga (Kelly Jean Peters), a Swedish immigrant.

This leads Jack to reunite with Old Lodge Skins and he is reintroduced to his Indian family and tribe members. Younger Bear has become a Contrary – a warrior who does everything in reverse. Jack makes friends with the Heemaneh Little Horse, but continues on his search for Olga.

To facilitate his search, Jack joins Custer's U.S. Cavalry unit as a scout. However, this is short-lived. When he witnesses a battle against the Cheyenne and the killing of women and children, Jack deserts.

As he’s hiding from the troops, Jack watches Sunshine (Aimée Eccles), the former wife of an Indian brave he knew, give birth. They take up and travel to a reservation on the Washita River, headed by Old Lodge Skins, now blind from a battle wound. A year later, in November 1868, Sunshine is about to give birth to Jack's child. Jack is surprised to discover that Olga and her new husband, Younger Bear (Cal Bellin), are neighbors.

Jack finds brief happiness when Sunshine (Aimée Eccles) presents him with their baby.

Since her sisters are widowed, Sunshine encourages Jack to sleep with them. However, he resists until Sunshine goes off to have their baby. The next morning after Jack has slept with Sunshine's sisters, she shows him his new son.

Their peace is shattered when Custer suddenly strikes and, miraculously, Jack leads Old Lodge Skins to safety. But when he tries to go back for Sunshine he watches her and their son be gunned down. To get revenge, Jack manages to sneak into Custer’s tent with the intention of killing him. However, he loses his nerve and wanders off.

Jack becomes the town drunk until Hickok rescues him.

Disheartened, Jack withdraws from life and becomes the town drunk living in Deadwood, South Dakota for several years. While in a drunken stupor, he is recognized by Wild Bill Hickok, who offers him money for a drink and gives him money to get cleaned up first. Hickok asks Jack to do him a favor. He wants him to deliver money to a widow he’s having an affair with so she can leave town and start over before his wife finds out. However, as soon as he leaves, Hickok is shot and killed while playing cards. Jack takes the money to the woman, now a prostitute who turns out to be Louise Pendrake. Jack gives her the money that Hickok intended for her to use to start a new life, but again rebuffs her sexual advances.

When Louise becomes a prostitute she calls herself LuLu.

Jack becomes a mountain man hermit and hunter. He becomes unhinged, however, when he finds a leg of an animal in one of his traps, realizing that the animal chewed its own leg to be free. Jack prepares to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff when he sees Custer and his troops and decides to seek revenge instead.

Custer rehires Jack as a scout and, believing that everything Jack says will be a lie, uses him as a reverse barometer. Jack uses this to his advantage, tricking Custer into leading his troops into a trap by honestly telling him of the overwhelming force of Native Americans hidden within the valley.

Jack gets his revenge when Custer is killed at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

Jack himself gets caught up in the battle and is only saved when Younger Bear recognizes him and takes him back to Old Lodge Skins, who is preparing for his own death ritual. Jack takes him up the mountain and Old Lodge Skin lies down to die. However, rain in his face makes him recognize that his time hasn’t come yet. The story ends with the two men walking down the mountain together.

Old Lodge Skin thinks it is his time to die, but it isn't.

Back in the present day, Jack abruptly ends his narrative story and he dismisses the historian. The final shot shows the aged Jack sitting in his wheelchair and somberly thinking back about his life in a world which no longer exists.

As I stated at the beginning of this review, Little Big Man takes a Forrest Gump approach, with the main character not necessarily front and center but certainly a part of many historical events, even if they all didn’t happen the way the movie portrays it. As an example, there are two massacres of Indians depicted in the film, the Battle of Washita River and the Sand Creek massacre, only the film has them chronologically out of order.

There is also the depiction of the death of Wild Bill Hickok. Hickok wasn’t killed until two months after the Battle of the Little Bighorn and was famously shot while playing poker at Nuttal & Mann's Saloon in Deadwood, South Dakota. At 4:15 p.m., on August 2, 1876, a gunslinger named Jack McCall walked in and shot Hickok in the back of the head. Hickok was famously holding two pairs—of black aces and black eights—when he was shot, a set of cards thereafter called the "Dead Man's Hand".

And the demise of Custer and his troops at Little Bighorn was not as depicted in the film, either. Custer's fatal tactics at the Little Bighorn were far more complex than the film portrays.

Released on December 15, 1970, the film would make $31,559,552 at the domestic box office during its initial run.

The film received mostly positive reviews. Variety described Little Big Man as “a sort of vaudeville show, framed in fictional biography, loaded with sketches of varying degrees of serious and burlesque humor,...”

Vincent Canby, writing in The New York Times, was more critical, saying, “The film, tries to cover too much ground, even though Calder Willingham's script eliminates or telescopes events and characters from the Berger novel. Often it is not terribly funny, at just those moments when it tries the hardest, and it sometimes wears its social concerns so blatantly that they look like war paint.”

However, he added, “All of these things are true, and yet “Little Big Man“— both in spite of and because of these failings—is an important movie by one of our most interesting directors. It is also one of the maybe half dozen American movies of this year that won't make you ponder the possibility of a subsidy plan to pay film makers not to work.”

Chief Dan George received a nomination for Best Actor in a Supporting Role.

The film received only one Academy Awards nomination, that for Chief Dan George for Best Actor
in a Supporting Role.

I will admit that this was my first time to see the film all the way through and I found the film sort of uneven as it bounces from comedic sequence to serious sequence and back. The film has a very dry sense of humor, so dry that it may occasionally gasp.

The same is true with Dustin Hoffman’s portrayal. For most of the film, his character also just bounces along without showing any emotion for the tragedy that had just occurred. Jack, with few exceptions, is only concerned with Jack. He does appear to love Sunshine and he looks at Old Lodge Skins like a father figure so he does show some real concern for two of them. Otherwise, he changes loyalties at the drop of a hat. He does at one point in the film admire Custer, though he rightfully comes to hate him and, as they say, revenge is best served cold.

I’ve also read that the film indirectly protests America's involvement in the Vietnam War by portraying the United States Armed Forces negatively. That doesn’t play as well, fifty years later, though the U.S. military does not come off very well in the film.

But would I recommend it? A rather subdued yes if for no other reason than it was critically hailed at the time. Which, like The Last Picture Show, might say more about the time it was made and reviewed than the quality of the film itself.