Word: crabb
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...film has George Armstrong Custer, Wild Bill Hickok and Buffalo Bill among its characters. But they all seem tame compared with the types portrayed by Dustin Hoffman, Martin Balsam and Faye Dunaway. In Little Big Man, from Thomas Berger's picaresque novel, Dustin plays the hero, Jack Crabb, who survives every imaginable peril until the age of 121, which ought to put the makeup men on their mettle. The putty looms large in Balsam's role as well; he plays a sly con artist whose enraged victims relieve him at various times of a hand...
...this fashion, Author Thomas Berger introduces Jack Crabb, who surely must be one of the most delightfully absurd fictional fossils ever unearthed from the Olden Time Fronteer. Berger solemnly declares that Crabb was "either the most neglected hero in the history of this country or a liar of insane proportions." Crabb, in fact, is both, which is just what Berger intended him to be. As relived by Crabb in Berger's telling, the legends and the romanticized history of the West are comically disassembled, like Hamlets seen from backstage. Typical is Crabb's meeting with Wyatt Earp...
...then, about that S & W you carry," said Wild Bill. "It is a handsome weapon, but the shells have a bad habit of erupting and jamming the chambers. I'd lay the piece aside and get me something else: a Colt's, with the Thuer conversion." Crabb reports that Hickok knew an hombre who carried a small pistol in his crotch. When cornered, the fellow would ask permission to relieve himself before dying, open his fly, and fire. "The trouble was one time he got overhasty and shot off his male parts...
Betwixt and between, Berger-Crabb is a spellbinding storyteller with a fine feel for frontier manners and morals and for fascinating Indian lore. And why didn't the Sioux scalp Custer? Jack Crabb knows (because he was there): Custer was getting bald...
...hostile act carrying with it the risk of war. A covert operation, however, is one accepted as "a peacetime avenue of action which, when used, will not upset international apple carts." In Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 state visit to Britain aboard a Soviet heavy cruiser, British Frogman Lionel Crabb mysteriously died in Portsmouth harbor while trying to examine the cruiser's hull. Yet the state visit continued and official relations remained unruffled because London followed the code by calmly disowning the dead frogman. The rule here, says Author Felix, is that "a covert operation's patent hostility...