Little Big Man (1970)

(On DVD, September 2019) One of the problems for modern viewers in delving too deep in the classical Hollywood western catalogue is the depiction of Natives in the subgenre. At best they’re ignored or acknowledged as sympathetic but secondary figures with valid viewpoints. At worse (and oh boy does it get worse), they’re mindless killing hordes to be destroyed in order to secure white colonialism and manifest destiny. It took, as with so many other things, the New Hollywood to start shifting things, even if in a matter of degrees. In portraying the picaresque life of a white man equally at ease in the white and Native worlds, Little Big Man is not, today, the most exemplary of films: The hero definitely remains a white man, the native characters are sympathetic but not developed to the extent that Custer, even as an antagonist, is characterized. But for a 1970 movie, it’s a welcome change of pace compared to film made even ten years earlier. The result, partially motivated by the growing affirmation of native populations that found a receptive ear in the late 1960s, does spend a lot of time depicting the late-1800s native lifestyle sympathetically. Our protagonist is adopted in a tribe after tragedy, then sent back to the white world thanks to massacres, and spends the rest of his life going back and forth between the two universes, often motivated to shift due to while people massacring native populations and revenge for those massacres. Custer featuring increasingly often in the story, and not in a sympathetic light. Dustin Hoffman stars as a then-unusual kind of protagonist. The tone, despite the seemingly endless slaughter, is often unusually funny, all the way to a final sequence meant to lead to an elegiac moment that, finally, doesn’t happen. Little Big Man is not always very fast-paced, the framing device is disappointing and the constant back-and-forth of the protagonist can be heartbreaking. Still, it has survived far better than one would expect, and much of this lasting good impression is based on a core of compassion that is entirely missing from earlier westerns.