Word: crabb
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Little Big Man. Arthur Penn's latest film may well be his best. Scripted by Galder Willingham from Thomas Berger's novel, it spans the 121-year life of Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman) to arrive at a truly epic vision of what the American experience is all about. As in Bonnie and Clyde and Alice's Restaurant, Penn's hero searches painfully for a way of life that will bring order and meaning to human existence. Crabb tries everything; he becomes an Indian, a white man, a con man, a drunk, a husband, a gun man, a resident...
...Jack Crabb is 121 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...
...Crabb knows Americana as he knows an old penny; from the Indian side and the In God We Trust side. He first 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...
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...
...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...