In 2014, Little Big Man was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress, and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.[7]
Plot
121-year-old Jack Crabb, the oldest man in the world, is residing in a hospice, and recounts his life story to a historian.[4]
In 1859, a 10-year-old Jack and his older sister Caroline survive the massacre of their pioneer parents by the Pawnee, and are discovered by Shadow, a Cheyenne brave, who takes the siblings to his village. Caroline escapes, but Jack remains and is reared by the good-hearted tribal leader, Old Lodge Skins.[4]
As Jack gets older, he unwittingly makes an enemy of another boy, Younger Bear; however, Younger Bear eventually owes his life to Jack when he saves Younger Bear's life from a Pawnee brave. Jack is given the name "Little Big Man" because he is short but very brave.
In 1865, when Jack is 16, he is captured by U.S. Cavalry troopers during a skirmish, and renounces his Cheyenne upbringing to save himself from being killed. After spending time in U.S. Army custody and going through interrogations and debriefing, Jack is put in the foster care of Reverend Silas Pendrake and his sexually frustrated wife, Louise, who tries to seduce Jack. After witnessing Mrs. Pendrake having sex with the soda shop owner, Jack leaves the Pendrake household and renounces his foster parents and religion.
In 1866, Jack becomes the apprentice of snake-oil salesman Meriweather. The two are tarred and feathered when their customers realize that Meriweather's products are fraudulent. One angry customer is Jack's now-grown sister Caroline, with whom he reunites. She attempts to mold her brother into a gunslinger named "the Soda Pop Kid". At a saloon, Jack meets Wild Bill Hickok, who takes a liking to him. When Hickok is forced to kill a man in self-defense, Jack loses his taste for gunslinging, and Caroline deserts him.
Months later, Jack becomes a partner in a general store and marries Olga, a Swedish woman. Jack's business partner turns out to be a thieving scoundrel. Cavalry officer George Armstrong Custer pays a visit. He suggests the couple restart their lives further west, and assures them they have nothing to fear from "Indians."
The couple set out, but their stagecoach is ambushed by Cheyenne warriors, and Olga is abducted. Setting out in search of her, Jack is reunited with Old Lodge Skins and Younger Bear. 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.
Months later, Jack becomes a "muleskinner" in Custer's 7th Cavalry, only because Custer incorrectly determines that was Jack's past job. He takes part in a battle against the Cheyenne, but when the troopers begin killing women and children, Jack turns on them.
On the outskirts of the massacre, Jack is attacked by Shadow, who does not recognize him. Shadow is killed by a cavalryman, and Jack discovers Shadow's daughter Sunshine giving birth while hiding from the onslaught. He returns with her to Old Lodge Skins's tribe. Sunshine becomes his wife and bears him a child. Jack again encounters Younger Bear, who is no longer a Contrary, but is now the henpecked husband of the long-lost Olga. Olga does not recognize Jack, who makes no attempt to make her remember him. Sunshine asks Jack to take in her three widowed sisters as wives, and to father children with them. He is reluctant at first, but finally agrees.
In November 1868, Custer and the 7thCavalry make attack the Cheyenne camp at the Washita River. Jack saves the now-blind and elderly Old Lodge Skins, but Sunshine, their child, and her sisters are killed. Jack tries to infiltrate Custer's camp to exact revenge, but loses his nerve to kill Custer.
Disheartened, Jack withdraws from life, and becomes the town drunk in Deadwood, South Dakota for years. While in a drunken stupor, he is recognized by Wild Bill Hickok, who gives him money to get cleaned up. Hickok is shot and killed while playing cards, and, with his last breath, asks Jack to bring money to a widow with whom he was having an affair. Jack visits the widow, who turns out to be Louise Pendrake, now a prostitute. Jack gives her the money Hickok intended for her to use to start a new life, but again rebuffs her sexual advances.
Jack becomes a trapper and hermit. His mind becomes unhinged after coming across an empty trap with a severed animal limb. He prepares to die by suicide, but sees Custer and his troops marching nearby, and decides to return to his quest for revenge.
Custer hires Jack as a scout, reasoning that anything he says will be a lie, thus serving as a perfect reverse barometer. In 1876, Jack tricks Custer into leading his troops into a trap at the Little Bighorn by truthfully telling Custer of the overwhelming force of Native Americans hidden within the valley.
As Custer's troops are slaughtered by the combined Sioux and Cheyenne group, Custer begins to rave insanely. A wouded Jack tells him to shut up. Custer attempts to shoot him, but is killed by Younger Bear, who then carries Jack away from the battlefield. Having thus discharged his life debt, Younger Bear announces that the next time they meet, he can kill Jack without becoming an evil person.[4]
Back at the Cheyenne camp, Jack accompanies Old Lodge Skins to a nearby hill, the Indian burial ground, where the old man, dressed in full chief's regalia, decides to end his life with dignity. He offers his spirit to the Great Spirit, and lies down at his spot at the Indian Burial Ground to wait for death.
Instead, it begins to rain. Old Lodge Skins is revealed to still be alive, and says, "Well, sometimes the magic works. Sometimes it doesn't." They return to his lodge to have dinner.[4]
Back in the present day, Jack ends his narrative story and dismisses the historian.
The historical Little Big Man was a Native American leader bearing no resemblance to the Jack Crabb character. Little Big Man is known for his involvement in the capture and possible assassination of Crazy Horse at Fort Robinson in 1877.
The movie's portrayal of the Battle of Washita River as a Custer-led massacre of women and children (which Penn compares to the Holocaust) is not entirely accurate, as the camp was partially occupied by tribal warriors.[citation needed] The film, however, is consistent with historical records of other encounters between Indians and the U.S. Cavalry; the Cavalry's common tactic was to wait until the warriors had left the camp to hunt, or to lure the warriors away with assurances of good hunting, then to attack the unprotected village. The two massacre scenes are historically reversed; the Sand Creek massacre occurred first in 1864, in which Colorado militia (not including Custer) attacked a peaceful contingent of Native Americans, killing more than 150 women, children and elderly men. (The Sand Creek Massacre was depicted in another 1970 Western, Soldier Blue.) The Custer-led raid on the Washita occurred in 1868.
The film also presents an inaccurate representation of the death of Wild Bill Hickok. Hickok was actually killed nearly two months after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, on August 2, 1876, while playing poker at Nuttal & Mann's Saloon in Deadwood, South Dakota. Uncharacteristically, Hickok had his back turned to the door. At 4:15p.m., Jack McCall walked in and shot Hickok in the back of the head. Hickok was famously holding two pairs — aces of uncertain suits and black eights — when he was shot, a set of cards thereafter called the "Dead Man's Hand".[8]
The film's depiction of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer as a lunatic at the Battle of the Little Bighorn was intended as satire, although many of his quirks and vanities were inspired by contemporary observations. Custer's fatal tactics at the Little Bighorn were far more complex than portrayed in the film, which portrays him as having a searing hatred of Indians, and acting ruthlessly towards them in battle.[citation needed]
The character of Jack Crabb is partially based on Curley, one of Custer's Native American scouts from the Crow tribe. Curley rode with Custer's 7thCavalry into the valley of the Little Bighorn, but was relieved of duty before the final attack, retreating to a nearby bluff to witness much of the action. Many conflicting stories of the era embellished Curley's participation, stating in several cases that he disguised himself with a Cheyenne blanket to escape the immediate field of battle. He was interviewed many times, with some writers claiming him to be the only surviving witness from the U.S. side of Custer's Last Stand. Curley gave several variations of his participation in the battle, and the accuracy of his later recollections has been questioned.[9] However, Thomas Leforge, who had recruited most of the Crow scouts for the event, maintained in Leforge's narrated biography that the claims were false, and that Curley neither took part as a scout had been expected to take part, nor claimed to have been in the battle.
Production
To obtain the hoarse voice of a 121-year-old man, Dustin Hoffman sat in his dressing room, screaming at the top of his lungs for an hour. The makeup for the ancient Crabb was created by Dick Smith from foam latex, and included revolutionary false eyelids that could blink along with the actor's. Due to editing, and much to Smith's chagrin, no blinks were visible in the finished film. Of the makeup, Hoffman was quoted in Life as saying, "I defy you to put on that makeup and not feel old".[10]
The role of Chief Old Lodge Skins was initially offered to Marlon Brando, Paul Scofield and Laurence Olivier, all of whom turned it down. The Little Bighorn battle scenes were filmed on location at Crow Agency, Montana, near the actual battle site. Some of the town scenes were filmed in Nevada City, Montana, a town that, by 1970, consisted predominantly of historic 19th-century buildings brought from elsewhere in Montana.
Aside from the Little Bighorn battle, all outdoor Indian scenes were filmed near Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Some interior and various other footage was shot on Hollywood sets. All Indian extras were North American Indians; although Aimée Eccles, who played Sunshine, is of British and Chinese descent,[11] and Cal Bellini, who played Younger Bear, was a Malay originally from Singapore.[12]
Old Lodge Skins dies at the end of the novel, but not in the film. In an interview, Arthur Penn explained the change: "We thought long and hard about this and in the first draft of the script he does die, but this death would have introduced an element of sadness into the film and we didn't want this. The film would have become dramatic, even melodramatic, instead of being picaresque. I also wanted to show that not only were the Indians going to be destroyed, but they were also condemned to live. On the whole, audiences like their entertainment dramatically compact and homogenous, but I want the opposite. A film should remain free and open, not with everything defined and resolved."[13]
Reception
Little Big Man received widespread acclaim from film critics. It was among AFI's 400 movies nominated to be on their list of America's greatest 100 movies.[5]On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 91% of 79 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8/10.The website's consensus reads: "An ambitious tall tale that boldly meshes farce with historical tragedy, Little Big Man is both an amusing comedic showcase and a persuasive political statement."[14]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 63 out of 100, based on 7 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[15]
In his December 15, 1970, review, Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the movie, "Arthur Penn's most extravagant and ambitious movie, an attempt to capture the essence of the American heritage in the funny, bitter, uproarious adventures of Jack Crabb."[16]Roger Ebert, of the Chicago Sun-Times, agreed, giving the film four stars out of four, and describing Little Big Man as "an endlessly entertaining attempt to spin an epic in the form of a yarn".[17]Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic wrote, "Arthur Penn has made a tangy and, I think, unique film with American verve, about some of the grisly things that American verve has done."[18]
Arthur Hiller's 1984 comedy dramaTeachers features Richard Mulligan partially reprising his Custer role as Herbert Gower, an outpatient from a mental institution who is accidentally put in charge of a U.S. history class. Gower teaches his pupils while impersonating historical figures, including Custer, but also Abraham Lincoln and Ben Franklin, among others.[21]
Actress Lily Gladstone, who is the first Indigenous person to win a Golden Globe award for acting,[22] has expressed admiration for Little Big Man, calling it a "great film".[23] However, she has also criticized the film's casting of Asian actors in Native American roles, which she interpreted as a means of likening the treatment of Indigenous peoples to American involvement in the Vietnam War. "That was absolutely an important talking point," she has stated, "but it was also Native history being used as a device to talk about something more political."[23]
The 2023 film The Holdovers, which is set in 1970, features a brief scene where Little Big Man is shown playing at the Boston Orpheum Theatre. During the scene, protagonist Paul Hunham, a classics professor portrayed by Paul Giamatti, remarks of the film, "You know, this is not only amusing, but for a movie, it's a fairly accurate depiction of life among the Cheyenne."
The Battle of the Little Bighorn, known to the Lakota and other Plains Indians as the Battle of the Greasy Grass, and commonly referred to as Custer's Last Stand, was an armed engagement between combined forces of the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes and the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army. The battle, which resulted in the defeat of U.S. forces, was the most significant action of the Great Sioux War of 1876. It took place on June 25–26, 1876, along the Little Bighorn River in the Crow Indian Reservation in southeastern Montana Territory.
George Armstrong Custer was a United States Army officer and cavalry commander in the American Civil War and the American Indian Wars.
The Battle of the Washita River occurred on November 27, 1868, when Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer's 7th U.S. Cavalry attacked Black Kettle's Southern Cheyenne camp on the Washita River.
Crazy Horse was a Lakota war leader of the Oglala band in the 19th century. He took up arms against the United States federal government to fight against encroachment by White American settlers on Native American territory and to preserve the traditional way of life of the Lakota people. His participation in several famous battles of the Black Hills War on the northern Great Plains, among them the Fetterman Fight in 1866, in which he acted as a decoy, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, in which he led a war party to victory, earned him great respect from both his enemies and his own people.
Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument preserves the site of the June 25 and 26, 1876, Battle of the Little Bighorn, near Crow Agency, Montana, in the United States. It also serves as a memorial to those who fought in the battle: George Armstrong Custer's 7th Cavalry and a combined Lakota-Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho force. Custer National Cemetery, on the battlefield, is part of the national monument. The site of a related military action led by Marcus Reno and Frederick Benteen is also part of the national monument, but is about 3 miles (4.83 km) southeast of the Little Bighorn battlefield.
Ashishishe, known as Curly and Bull Half White, was a Crow scout in the United States Army during the Sioux Wars, best known for having been one of the few survivors on the United States side at the Battle of Little Bighorn. He did not fight in the battle, but watched from a distance, and was the first to report the defeat of the 7th Cavalry Regiment. Afterward a legend grew that he had been an active participant and managed to escape, leading to conflicting accounts of Curly's involvement in the historical record.
Frederick William Benteen was a military officer who first fought during the American Civil War. He was appointed to commanding ranks during the Indian Campaigns and Great Sioux War against the Lakota and Northern Cheyenne. Benteen is best known for being in command of a battalion of the 7th U. S. Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in late June, 1876.
White Man Runs Him was a Crow scout serving with George Armstrong Custer's 1876 expedition against the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne that culminated in the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
Goes Ahead was a Crow scout for George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry during the 1876 campaign against the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne. He was a survivor of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, and his accounts of the battle are valued by modern historians.
Hairy Moccasin was a Crow scout for George Armstrong Custer's 7th Cavalry during the 1876 campaign against the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne. He was a survivor of the Battle of the Little Big Horn.
Wooden Leg was a Northern Cheyenne warrior who fought against Custer at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.
They Died with Their Boots On is a 1941 American Biographical western film from Warner Bros. Pictures, produced by Hal B. Wallis and Robert Fellows, directed by Raoul Walsh, that stars Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland.
The Plainsman is a 1936 American Western film directed by Cecil B. DeMille and starring Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur. The film presents a highly fictionalized account of the adventures and relationships between Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Buffalo Bill Cody, and General George Custer, with a gun-runner named Lattimer as the main villain. The film is notorious for mixing timelines and even has an opening scene with Abraham Lincoln setting the stage for Hickok's adventures. Anthony Quinn has an early acting role as an Indian. A remake using the same title was released in 1966.
George Armstrong Custer (1839–1876) was a United States Army cavalry commander in the American Civil War and the Indian Wars. He was defeated and killed by the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. More than 30 movies and countless television shows have featured him as a character. He was portrayed by future U.S. president, Ronald Reagan in Santa Fe Trail (1940), as well as by Errol Flynn in They Died With Their Boots On (1941).
Mo-nah-se-tah or Mo-nah-see-tah, aka Me-o-tzi, was the daughter of the Cheyenne chief Little Rock. Her father was killed on November 28, 1868, in the Battle of Washita River when the camp of Chief Black Kettle, of which Little Rock was a member, was attacked by the 7th U.S. Cavalry under the command of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer. Mo-nah-se-tah was among the 53 Cheyenne women and children taken captive by the 7th Cavalry after the battle.
The Wolf Mountains, el. 4,842 feet (1,476 m), sometimes referred to by local people as the Rosebud Mountains, and also known to the Crow Native Americans as the Wolf Teeth Mountains, are a mountain range east of Lodge Grass, Montana in Big Horn County, Montana.
Thomas Bailey Marquis was an American self-taught historian and ethnographer who wrote about the Plains Indians and other subjects of the American frontier. He had a special interest in the destruction of George Armstrong Custer's battalion at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, which became his lifelong obsession. Marquis' body of work is valued by historians for his recording of the life stories of several Plains Indians and his writing on their way of life, particularly those involved in the Custer fight, notably Wooden Leg in A Warrior Who Fought Custer. Marquis carried out this research at a time when few were interested in the Indian version of events, even though no American soldiers survived the Custer fight. Marquis' work is thus both unique and unrepeatable.
The Crow War, also known as the Crow Rebellion, or the Crow Uprising, was the only armed conflict between the United States and the Crow tribe of Montana, and the last Indian War fought in the state. In September 1887, the young medicine man Wraps-Up-His-Tail, or Sword Bearer, led a small group of warriors in a raid against a group of Blackfoot which had captured horses from the Crow reservation. Following the raid, Sword Bearer led his group back to the Crow Agency to inform the Indian agent of his victory, but an incident arose which ended with the young leader taking his followers into the mountains. In response, the United States Army launched a successful campaign to bring the Crow back to the reservation.
Little Big Man is a 1964 novel by American author Thomas Berger. Often described as a satire or parody of the western genre, the book is a modern example of picaresque fiction. Berger made use of a large volume of overlooked first-person primary materials, such as diaries, letters, and memoirs, to fashion a wide-ranging and entertaining tale that comments on alienation, identity, and perceptions of reality. Easily Berger's best known work, Little Big Man was made into a popular 1970 film by Arthur Penn. It has been called "Berger's response to the great American myth of the frontier, representing as it does most of the central traditions of American literature."
White Swan (c.1850—1904), or Mee-nah-tsee-us in the Crow language, was one of six Crow Scouts for George Armstrong Custer's 7th Cavalry Regiment during the 1876 campaign against the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne. At the Battle of the Little Bighorn in the Crow Indian Reservation, White Swan went with Major Reno's detachment, and fought alongside the soldiers at the south end of the village. Of the six Crow scouts at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, White Swan stands out because he aggressively sought combat with multiple Sioux and Cheyenne warriors, and he was the only Crow Scout to be wounded in action, suffering severe wounds to his hand/wrist and leg/foot. After being disabled by his wounds, he was taken to Reno's hill entrenchments by Half Yellow Face, the pipe-bearer (leader) of the Crow scouts, which no doubt saved his life.
1 2 "Little Big Man in 35mm". Academy Museum of Motion Pictures - Timeline. Retrieved February 20, 2024. This epic revisionist Western plays out in flashback as recalled by Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman in extreme old age makeup by Dick Smith), a 121-year-old white man who was raised by the Cheyenne nation in the 1800s.
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