Word: manfully
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...years old. His eyes are agate chips; senility seeps through the cracks in his voice. But Crabb is not your average superannuated former Indian fighter, former Indian, intimate of Wild Bill Hickok and General George Armstrong Custer, ex-gunslinger, scalawag and drunkard. No sir. He is Little Big Man, sole survivor of the Battle of Little Bighorn. He may tell a stretcher or two, but when he reminisces, graduate students listen. A budding anthropologist starts a tape recorder, Crabb opens his toothless yawp and the saga unfurls...
...unfurls. And unfurls. For 21 hours Little Big Man turns the tableaux on nearly every aspect of Western man. Thomas Berger's 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...
...appears as a boy whose family has been massacred by redskins. The Cheyennes who carry him off seem a mere mob to begin with, but they soon separate into individuals who refer to one another (in English translation) as "Human Beings." The boy becomes an adopted brave, Little Big Man...
Director Arthur Penn has been alternately shrewd and loco with Little Big Man, but mainly he has been plumb lucky. In the book, Crabb complains about western movies that show Indians played by Caucasians "with 5 o'clock shadows and lumpy arms." Perversely, Penn sought Sir Laurence Olivier and Paul Scofield for the chieftain's role. When they refused, he awarded the part to Richard Boone, who resigned shortly before filming. It was only then that Penn chose a hereditary leader of Canada's Salish tribe, Chief George, to play the old man. It was a momentous...
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...