Little Big Man

Little Big Man; western satire, USA, 1970; D: Arthur Penn, S: Dustin Hoffman, Chief Dan George, Martin Balsam, Richard Mulligan, Faye Dunaway

Jack Crabb is 121 years old and retells his life to a chronicler: in the 19th century, Pawnee Indians kill his parents, he is adopted by the Cheyenne, while his sister runs away. Jack gets the name Little Big Man and his adopted grandfather, Old Lodge Skins, is teaching him about the wisdom of love. But during a fight, Jack gets captured by the White Americans and adopted by a reverend whose wife Louis is trying to seduce him. Later, Jack sells false medicine, meets his sister again, learns how to shoot with a revolver, and marries Olga, who was kidnapped by the Indians. Jack returns to the Indians and gets four wives that are killed by general George Custer. Jack tricks Custer into an ambush where the latter is killed.

"Cheyennes, who called themselves human beings, didn't harm me". "People believe everything. The more incredible the better". "You have to wash. Take your clothes off and in the given moment I will turn my view away". Those are just few of the many comical dialogues in this amusing Western satire that mostly gains its energy from an ironic view of the Old West, twisting its old myths and showing Indians as three-dimensional human beings. Dustin Hoffman brilliantly plays the main hero Jack, although he seems a little bit passive at moments due to lack of dramatic focus and an acronym of characterisation. The director Arthur Penn ("Bonny & Clyde") constructs the film in a original way, almost as if his motto is to always refuse a normal, conventional film, full of quirky humor that breaks the cliches of the Western genre: in one scene, Indians look at the underpants of Jack's sister who thinks she will be raped, but in reality they are only doing this because they are not sure if she is a man or a woman. One Indian character is so bizarre that he does everything backwards: he walks backwards, says "Hello" when he means "Good bye", baths in dry sand and dries himself in the lake, while some other one is gay. Chief Dan George is excellent as Jack's adopted grandfather. And the small details, like the one where the unknown hero Jack influences the outcome of general Custer's failure, neatly displays the gag of "unknown celebrities" and serves as the forerunner to "Forrest Gump", at least in spirit, whereas, just like many westerns of that time, it is an allegory on the Vietnam War which waged back in that time, especially in the sequence of the massacre of Indians. "Little Big Man" has many flaws, but one enjoys in them because even in their errors they still lead to something more, a virtue which redeems everything. 

Grade:+++