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There are films in the history of cinema that most audiences will never watch, either because they are too "old" or even unknown, often even to those who claim to be "lovers" of the seventh art. "Little Big Man" is one of these: despite having two already very famous actors like Dustin Hoffman and Faye Dunaway and a director who had made a name for himself directing works like "The Chase" and "Bonnie and Clyde", this 1970 film remains something unknown to many, too many. The reason is simple: "Little Big Man" is a western (a genre not very loved by audiences) and, moreover, it is an atypical western.
We are in 1970 and unexpectedly three films centered on the Indian/white struggle are released, with the perspective focused on the defeated Native Americans: Penn's film, "Soldier Blue" by Ralph Nelson and "A Man Called Horse" by Elliot Silverstein. It is the revolution of the western that crosses the 70s, bursting with an innovative perspective that fully participates in the auteur ferment of New Hollywood.
Arthur Penn draws inspiration from the homonymous novel by Thomas Berger and brings to the screen the epic of Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman) who is forced to live among Native Americans after an attack on his family since he was a child. He is taken in by "Old Lodge Skins" (an extraordinary Chief Dan George) as a son, then begins a long peregrination: he escapes death at the hands of the whites and is raised by Mrs. Pendrake (Faye Dunaway) before ending up as the assistant to a charlatan, and then meets again the sister who had lived with him among the Native Americans, becoming a skilled snake oil salesman. Subsequently, he marries a Swedish woman who is then kidnapped by the Native Americans, whom he will return to find. And then back and forth in the U.S. army under General Custer's command, but certainly not to assist him in his massacres of the natives.
Just these few plot points are enough to understand that Penn's film is not the classic western where one waits for the central event of the story, as happens in "High Noon" or "Rio Bravo", just to name two essential and well-known works. The back-and-forth situations Jack experiences are the result of the filmmaker's idea: to show the diversity of views and approaches to life between the natives, seen by the society of the time as enemies, and the society of the white oppressors. A sociological gaze that does not disdain the infusion of comedy, but at the same time has the primary goal of narrating the paradox of a way of life, the Native American way, more tolerant when compared to the "civilized world": not only are white strangers accepted into the community more naturally than the "whites" would have done, but also the presence of a homosexual held in high regard is the sign of a society that might have seemed primitive to outsiders but was instead more open and "cosmopolitan" than American racism, well represented by the erratic figure of General Custer.
Arthur Penn had debuted in cinema with a western ("The Left Handed Gun", 1958) entirely different and classical compared to "Little Big Man". If in that case he narrated the story of one of the many legendary names of the west, here he overturns the schemes and conventions, as he had already done for drama and biopics and as he will subsequently do for noir. Penn has never been an author for the masses, although he often worked with giant actor names. In "Little Big Man" he not only aims to rehabilitate that world which his fellow countrymen had almost entirely eliminated, but he also continues a process of narrating alienated and contradictory America in the harsh transition from the '60s to the '70s, when the country already felt that Vietnam would not only mean defeat but also a wound that the haughty Americans would carry with them for at least a decade. Vietnam as Little Big Horn.
Nearly fifty years after its release, "Little Big Man" remains a memorable and iconic film of a world now dissolving. The lengthy flashback with which Jack Crabb narrates his story is the symptom of a lost world that now lives only in the memories of men. It is true when people say that in action scenes the film seems dated, but it is a flaw that old films share due to the technical equipment that made shooting a scene like the final one (the Battle of Little Big Horn) extremely complicated. Signs of the times that do not mar the narrative and nostalgic power of a film that has redrawn the history of the western and given a hint of justice to those who were massacred in the name of the "civilizers'" expansionism.
"The more something is alive, the more whites do everything to destroy it. That's the difference."
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