Little Big Man

Ford is the butt of the burlesque (Stagecoach, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Searchers), but also the precursor of the form (Cheyenne Autumn). "The last of the old-timers" tells all, the survivor of a century of American history and myth, a latex cranium weighted down by the epochs. An orphan in the charred covered wagon, taught the ways of "the Human Beings" by the Cheyenne. "For a boy, it was a kind of paradise. I wasn't just playin' Injun, I was livin' Injun." Dutiful churchgoer during "my religious period," then with black hat and revolvers as the Soda Pop Kid, throughout there's Dustin Hoffman's striking resemblance to Buster Keaton. On one side the serene wholeness of Old Lodge Skins (Chief Dan George), on the other the mendacity of the grifter who keeps losing body parts (Martin Balsam). "He gave you a vision of moral order in the universe, and there isn't any." An epic of deflation is an inspired contradiction, Arthur Penn at his most ambitiously freewheeling wouldn't want it any other way. Vigorous vaudeville turns, deranged archetypes in a surrealistic outlook—the pious lady (Faye Dunaway) is later a wilted bordello flower, Wild Bill Hickok (Jeff Corey) is understandably nervous around other gunslingers. Estranged sister into rowdy posse leader (Carole Androsky), Swedish wife into tough squaw (Kelly Jean Peters). "It was downright discouraging. If it wasn't the Indians tryin' to kill me for a white, it was the whites tryin' to kill me for an Indian." General Custer (Richard Mulligan) haloed by blasting sunlight, bare-chested in his tent like Marat, ranting in the battlefield about "poison from the goo-nads" (cf. Dr. Strangelove's "precious bodily fluids"). Slapstick and pathos and violence, the genocide of genre and the truth of human weirdness. "Well, sometimes the magic works and sometimes it doesn't." The great heir is Jarmusch's Dead Man. Cinematography by Harry Stradling Jr. With Aimee Eccles, Cal Bellini, Robert Little Star, William Hickey, Thayer David, and M. Emmet Walsh.