Arthur Penn (1970)

The first sight of the face of thirty-three-year-old Dustin Hoffman as 121-year-old Jack Crabb, the hero of Little Big Man, is remarkable – a pair of eyes deep in the wizened face constructed by the great make-up artist Dick Smith.  The first sound of Jack isn’t so impressive.  Hoffman would go to his dressing room and shout as loudly as possible for an hour in order to weaken his voice and create a centenarian-plus effect.  The resulting quavery singsong still sounds the way an actor pretending to be much older than he really is tends to sound.  You’re especially aware of this as soon as Arthur Penn cuts away from the opening confrontation between Jack Crabb and the oral historian who’s come to the nursing home to interview him.  Once Jack is reduced to a voice on the soundtrack, as he starts to tell the tall story of his life, the set rhythm of Hoffman’s delivery is all the more pronounced.  It’s a pity that Dick Smith’s make-up gets so little further screen time but a relief that Penn increasingly rations Jack’s voiceover narration too.

Thomas Berger’s novel Little Big Man uses a bildungsroman framework to fashion a picaresque satire, what Berger’s biographer Brooks Landon called his ‘response to the great American myth of the frontier’.  Jack Crabb, an orphaned white boy raised by the Cheyenne nation, passes through the nineteenth-century American West, from one job to another, to and fro between white and Native American cultures.  He encounters on the way, as well as other fictional creations, the likes of Buffalo Bill, Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickox and General Custer.  Jack claims to be the ‘sole white survivor’ of the Battle of the Little Bighorn (although he’s named ‘Little Big Man’ by the Cheyenne, years before 1876).  Berger’s novel was published in 1964.  Although the first US military fatality had occurred three years previously, the Vietnam War was, from the American point of view, still in its infancy.  (The first deployment of US combat units was in January 1965.)  The situation was quite different by the time Arthur Penn and the scenarist Calder Willingham began work on adapting Little Big Man for the screen.

Even though awareness of the Native American experience in the nineteenth-century American West was increasing in 1970 (the year that saw the publication of Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee), Vietnam was culturally pervasive by the time Penn’s film was completed.  Little Big Man’s negative depictions of the pioneer spirit in action in the Wild West are inflected with a more urgent dismay at modern American imperialism in the Far East – for example, in the distinctly Oriental appearance of Jack’s Native-American wife Sunshine (played by Hong Kong-born Aimée Eccles), who is murdered by Custer’s 7^th Cavalry.   In theory, it should be possible to blend the humorous and serious elements of the Thomas Berger material into a coherent whole.  In practice, the shifts in tone of Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man make it look to be arguing with itself and the conscious attempt to make it an anti-Vietnam War picture may be a main cause of the problem.  The importance of the War actually taking place at the time – the antithesis of a laughing matter to a political liberal like Penn – clouded his judgment as an artist.

Little Big Man includes three main warfare episodes – two assaults against the Cheyenne by Custer and his men before the Little Bighorn finale.  As you’d expect from their work together on Bonnie and Clyde, Penn and his editor Dede Allen stage these episodes well yet they seem, thanks to the long intervening stretches of hip(pish) humour, to belong in a different film.  The more expertly filmed and shocking the scenes of carnage, the more discordant they are (especially the 7^th Cavalry attack in which Sunshine is killed).  Dustin Hoffman epitomises the movie’s split personality.  His presence is so contemporary that he’s naturally incongruous in a historical setting.  (There are times when he’s not much less out of place in the Wild West than Woody Allen, more intentionally, was a few years later in the spoof Tolstoyan Russia of Love and Death.)  There’s an advantage to this:  Hoffman’s modernity, allied with his terrific wit, means he can manage the lampoon-cartoon mode of the film without strain.  There is strain, though, in his attempts to express ‘true’ emotion, except when he has the mask of the geriatric make-up.

The supporting acting in Little Big Man isn’t satisfyingly orchestrated.  It’s hardly surprising, of course, that the Native Americans, rather than embodying ridiculous or reprehensible attitudes, are the mouthpieces for quietly ironic political comment.   The noble-faced Chief Dan George, as the tribal leader Old Lodge Skins, who supervises Jack’s education with the Cheyenne, and whom Jack calls grandfather, does this effectively.  (The Native Americans not played by the real thing aren’t so good.)  Richard Mulligan’s Custer also works well.  He’s so extraordinarily long and thin he has effortlessly the look of a caricature.  Mulligan plays him as an alarming, vain crackpot yet the actor shows an almost touching sympathy with Custer.  As often happens, actors in smaller roles are anxious to make the most of their limited opportunities, which tends to confuse the meaning of the story.  Through being over-emphatic, William Hickey (as the oral historian interviewer), Carol Androsky (Jack’s sister, Caroline) and Kelly Jean Peters (his first wife, the termagant Olga) make an impression out of proportion to the political significance of their characters.  Faye Dunaway is conspicuous in a somewhat different way.  She’s amusing in the role of the sexually frustrated wife of a pastor (Thayer David) – but amusing as Faye Dunaway doing a special-guest-star amusing turn.  Well-judged playing by Martin Balsam (the snake-oil salesman Allardyce T Merriwether) and Jeff Corey (Wild Bill Hiccox) helps steady the ship.

Little Big Man was widely praised on its original release.  In 2014, it was deemed ‘culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant’ by the Library of Congress and chosen for preservation in the US National Film Registry.  There’s no denying its ambition or the importance of its themes.  It’s these themes, rather than the film itself, that explain its enduring reputation.

5 June 2017