(His sister, ever in fear of being raped by the savages, skedaddles unscathed.)ĭubbed Little Big Man because of his slight stature, Crabb grows up learning the ways of the “Human Beings,” as the Cheyenne call themselves. The two are taken back to camp, which eventually becomes home to the orphaned Jack. Little Jack and his sister, Caroline (Carol Androsky), cower under a wagon’s canopy, their parents murdered, but are soon found by a wandering Cheyenne. Penn takes us back with a beautiful pan of a grassy expanse… that ends on the smoky remains of a plundered caravan. Bookended by scenes of Crabb in the present day recounting his life story to a historian, the narrative is a far-fetched picaresque that offers nothing less than a survey of the American conquest of the West. Unrecognizable under Terry Miles’ masterful makeup, Dustin Hoffman plays 121-year-old Jack Crabb, the only white survivor of Custer’s Last Stand. How could there be when genocide is revealed to be the national project? Unlike Sam Peckinpah’s epitaphs to the genre, there is no hint of reverence in Penn’s version of the West. Little Big Man was by no means the first of its kind, but it seems from this vantage to be the most vitriolic of the wild bunch of Westerns that came out during the period. Penn’s oater didn’t just dispel the cloudless America of Westerns past - it dismembered the genre, threw the parts in a trench, and spit on the tombstone. By Nixon, it was no longer clear who the good guys were supposed to be. The country’s decline from Eisenhowerian optimism (or obliviousness) to Nixonian cynicism can be traced in the ongoing war on the screen between cowboys and Indians. Fount of myths and mirror of the national mood, the genre became a proxy canvas for the protest movement’s apocalyptic vision. Wayne’s movie notwithstanding, Hollywood actually didn’t delve into the Vietnam quagmire until after Saigon’s fall. Vietnam was simply the next frontier, the Viet Cong the new Indians, an analogy that the 1969 release of The Green Berets, directed by and starring John Wayne, only encouraged. adventure in Indochina as a logical extension of its expansionist policy and the white man’s rapacious appetite. In lockstep with leftist thought on American imperialism and Western civilization, Penn casts the U.S. Penn’s animating metaphor may seem musty to contemporary eyes, but one can only imagine its revelatory jolt back in the day. Released midway through Nixon’s first term and in the heat of the Vietnam War, the film is reflective of the darkening mood - both the nation’s and the movies’. This outraged reconfiguration of an all-American genre may be set in the Wild West, but it’s also very much a bulletin of its time. At once the goofiest and angriest of all revisionist Westerns, Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (1970) seems today less notable for its formal qualities than for its (counter)cultural content.
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