Word: film
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...scrambled 100,000 miles across country. Selling, pushing. Merchandising. He appeared on Cavett, Carson. "I'm kind of a folk hero at Yale," he liked to say. "The closest thing to a Beatle." Fraternities called him up en masse; Middle America wrote in; most important, publishing houses and film companies used Love Story as a new shibboleth. The escape hatch had been opened. Erich...
...panoramic novel owed its salinity to an immediate relative, Huckleberry Finn, from which it ransacked idiom and hyperbole by the chapterful. Like Huck, young Jack had no social insight; he accepted violence and duplicity the way he regarded sleet and fire−as aspects of earthly life. The film happily preserves the chronicle's innocence, if not its exact text...
...Drunkard, with galvanic gestures and frozen speech patterns. The Human Beings, by contrast, are a people of dignity and variety. Among them are the homosexual Little Horse; the contrary Younger Bear, who says "hello" for "goodbye" and bathes in dirt instead of water; and the true lodestar of the film, Old Lodge Skins (played by Chief Dan George...
Would that the film makers had Chief George's ingenuousness or Hoffman's technique. For Calder Willingham (End as a Man) has provided a scenario that begins with robust rawhide humor, turns to profundity−and then collapses into petulant editorial. In the era of occupied Alcatraz, surely it is no news that the white man spoke with forked tongue, that the first Americans were maltreated as the last savages. The Battle of Little Bighorn, which should be the film's climax, is its weakest point. General Custer is pure Pig on the Prairie, babbling insanely...
Given such grossness, why should Little Big Man be counted as a rambunctious triumph? Because in its 360° scope of slaughter and laughter, the film has contrived to lampoon, revere or revile the length and breadth of the entire frontier. On the trek, it demonstrates inconsistencies and errata. For months audiences will be talking about them. It also accomplishes that rarest achievement, the breathing of life into an ossified art form. The '70s has its first great epic. Blood brother to the 1903 one-reeler, The Great Train Robbery, Little Big Man is the new western to begin...