Little Big Man

Little Big Man is a 1964 novel by Thomas Berger that was adapted into the Arthur Penn film (1970) by the same name. The fictional Little Big Man has only a tenuous connection to the real-life Little Big Man, an Oglala Lakota chief who was a rival and a lieutenant of Crazy Horse and fought [Page 1358]at the Battle of Little Bighorn (as did the fictional Little Big Man).

The fictional Little Big Man was a white man, Jack Crabb, and the book is his memoir dictated at age 111. Over the course of the picaresque episodic novel, Crabb is captured by both Indians and whites, is rescued from the same, and encounters many of the famous historical figures of the Old West, including lawmen Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok, entertainer Buffalo Bill, and General George Armstrong Custer. Crabb takes on a great many roles, allowing Berger to emulate many of the tropes of the western genre and shift modes of storytelling. Crabb is a man adrift in his era, at home neither with the whites of his birth nor with the Plains Indians who named him Little Big Man.

A World War II veteran who served in a medical unit with the occupation forces in Berlin, Berger worked as a librarian and a copyeditor of Popular Science after the war, until he was able to focus on writing full-time. Little Big Man was his third book and his biggest commercial success, although in 1984 his novel The Feud was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction by the fiction nominating committee. (The Pulitzer board overrode the recommendation and selected Ironweed by William Kennedy.) His other novels include crime novels, science fiction, and a retelling of the King Arthur legend called Arthur Rex. He is generally described as a satirist, and he published his 21st novel, a sequel to Little Big Man titled The Return of Little Big Man, in 1999.

Marlon Brando originally secured the film rights to Little Big Man but was unable to attract backers to fund a production. When a new production began, directed by Bonnie and Clyde‘s Arthur Penn, Brando was offered the role of Chief Old Lodge Skins but turned it down. The role was instead played by Chief Dan George, a chief of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation in British Columbia. George was subsequently nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, as well as winning several critics’ awards.

Dustin Hoffman played Crabb in the film, fresh from of his Oscar-nominated performance in Midnight Cowboy. One of the film actors most associated with “method” acting, Hoffman prepared for his scenes as the old Crabb by screaming repeatedly for an hour until his voice was hoarse.

The film was widely acclaimed and brought renewed attention to the novel. In dramatizing the satirical view of both white pioneer and Lakota Indian civilization in the 19th century, Little Big Man became one of the key films of the revisionist westerns—films that rebelled against the traditional casting of the Indian as villain and of white westward expansion as Manifest destiny. The Native Americans in the film are largely sympathetic, particularly Old Lodge Skins (who survives in the movie, unlike in the novel), while the cavalry is portrayed as outright villainous.

...