Little Big Man (Arthur Penn, 1970)

 

Concluding Arthur Penn’s amazing peak period, Little Big Man is an indelibly daring and captivating work, immersed in American history and myth as both tragedy and farce, as an endlessly shifting, unreliable narrative. The framing device of narrator Jack Crabb, claiming to be 121 years old as he recounts his life and times into a visiting researcher’s tape recorder, alerts us to the possibility of tall tales: his story kicks off with being orphaned in a Pawnee raid and then raised by the Cheyenne (or “human beings” as they refer to themselves, in contrast to the “white men”), subsequently spending time as a gunfighter, an Army scout, a shopkeeper, a traveling confidence man, a deadbeat drunk, and more; the tenor of his life varies from outright farce to chilling bereftness, with Penn engineering some masterful tonal shifts, perfectly in tune with an ideally cast Dustin Hoffman. But however large and varied the canvas of Jack’s life, the underlying force is toward repetition and withdrawal: time and again, he finds himself back with the beleaguered Cheyenne, at the side of his adopted grandfather (Chief Dan George); time and again, characters that seemed gone from his life suddenly reappear, for better or for worse; however much America pushes outward and upward and burnishes its legend, the ultimate trajectory is toward settling, reduced mobility, calcified attitudes and forgone dreams. There’s no possibility of narrative or thematic closure - the film’s final observation is merely that “sometimes the magic works and sometimes it doesn’t” - and it withholds any sense of what Jack’s story can accomplish at this distance (no less now than then, one could endlessly debate the virtue of the ends to which the country deploys its distorted grasp of its own history). On the debit side, and like many works of its period, the film seems most dated now in its sexual politics, its women mostly conceived in one-note terms, the note of course being a sexual one.