Camera And Action, page 28
Yet, popular culture had passed the likes of the Bunkers. Social change throughout the coming decades brought more complexities. Archie's discomfort did not end with the battle of the sexes and generations. He was asked to make room for a new model of America. This time it would be a multicultural story where groups mingled and narratives changed. While Archie was concerned with dirty movies, Hollywood was quickly turning the tables a bit further. This time a new discourse of ethnicity gained widespread notice. The larger culture turned to new questions about Americanness and the portrayal of American history.
Filmmakers who wished to engage in the debate reimagined the representation of history within a national narrative of westward movement. Arthur Penn rewrote the West and liberated Native Americans from nearly a hundred years of cinematic bondage as the varmints of western lore. He brought Dustin Hoffman back as a white man of the nineteenth century who lived over a hundred years to tell the real story of the West. A daunting feat, it would take a Little Big Man to stand up and deliver the next treatise about another romance of the Hollywood kind.
Turn the damned thing on; this is how it was.
-Jack Crabb in Little Big Man
It is 5:30 A.M. Arthur Penn rises, sips coffee, and leaves his Montana rental for the Little Big Man film set. There, cowboy and Indian extras tiptoe across "prickly pear cactus" and move toward "mock villages" set up on the Crow Indian Reservation and at a local ranch. Penn hoists his tortoise-shell glasses off his head and yells, "Cut. Let's do it again." The production crew tips over covered wagons and positions burnt tipis. Makeup artists prepare their actors and actresses for the retakes. Actor Dustin Hoffman, who portrays the main character Jack Crabb, takes a break in his portable trailer, reading The Village Voice and The New Republic.'
At the end of the day, Penn ships the takes to Hollywood and awaits their return. Back at the screening room in Billings, some of the cast join editor Dede Allen for a preview of earlier clips. After screenings Penn returns to his Montana house and sips martinis while perusing The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, and other eastern newsprint. "I am very sympathetic to the young now," he tells a New York Times reporter. "I am very fixed at that point emotionally," and he takes a call from Arlo Guthrie's manager, who tells him that his account of the hippies, Alice's Restaurant, is a smashing success.2
While the Guthrie movie mesmerized audiences across the country, Penn set up cameras in eight Montana locations. He was fixed emotionally on the victims of frontier history, not the victors. Shot on local ranches, on reservations, and in Montana towns, Penn's rendition represented the way the West was instead of the way it was imagined. At least, that was the idea behind the project. In an attempt to take the Western into the seventies and beyond, Penn revised the celluloid construction of the Hollywood Indian by converting Thomas Berger's Little Big Man, published in 1964, into a manifesto for Indian empathy. The noble savage and the bloodthirsty villains of captivity narratives would be replaced by New Age authentics in the "tell it like it is" mode of cinema.
For Penn, social activism, Westerns, and Montana were a natural fit. Where better to stage this revision than the territory itself because, most likely, as the director said, "It just doesn't get any better. Montana is the real thing." Having just discovered Montana after vacationing there and listening to local rancher Earl Rosell and Billings mayor Willard Fraser talk about the "Treasure State's" magnificent scenery, Penn saw potential for a successful blend between story and scenery. The Montana location would enable him to revise cinematic representations and help historically subordinated groups become agents in narratives on screen.' Montana offered a real look - a big screen, as it were - for an updated image of Native Americans.
The Penn crew raised its cameras toward the Montana landscape in the context of the multicultural debates about America. It was a diverse model that best described the changes from the sixties. His film registered that social mix, beginning with the casting of a Canadian actor and longshoresman, Chief Dan George, in the supporting role of Old Lodge Skins, the Cheyenne patriarch. This role was personal for George. "I wanted to show that an Indian, if he had talent, could play an Indian better than a white," the chief said, "simply because he was playing his own nationality." He finally found his chance to "get things right."4 To complete the picture of authenticity, Crow Indians filled in as extras. With an authentic chief in a starring role and young Crows on horses, this project revised the mainstream screen and protested the cinema's victimization of American Indians. If an activist perspective could help reconstruct positive screen roles for Native Americans, then perhaps it would improve civil liberties and social relations in America, too.
Showing America as an oppressor to a 1970 audience was not daring, but asking Indians to play themselves in major roles to deconstruct American history was. The effect was nothing short of a new cultural dimension for Westerns, the West, and Indians. Yet while the film's consciousness-raising successfully advanced a multicultural polemic, Little Big Man committed one significant crime. Just what Penn was producing was not quite clear. Was it reshaping the past by opening up the stereotypes or merely creating new ones that imposed a different kind of subjugation?5 On Penn's set in Montana territory, one man held the answer.
Jack Crabb is the 121-year-old survivor of the Battle of Little Big Horn. As the film opens, a history graduate student (William Hickey) has come to the veterans' hospital to interview Jack. "I am more interested in the primitive lifestyle of the Plains Indians" and their "way of life," he condescends. "The tall tale about Custer" or another Old West "adventure" story that Crabb is about to tell has no credence in history, the interviewer explains. Jack takes control of the interviewer's tape recorder, and the camera preps audiences to hear the truth. "You turn that thing on and shut up," he scolds and his story begins. The camera and recorder take viewers back to the nineteenth century when Pawnees ambushed Jack Crabb's westward-moving family. Jack and his sister Caroline (Carole Androsky) were subsequently taken to a Cheyenne village to be taught the "primitive" way of life.
Jack is the mobile, resourceful, postmodern character - a jack of all trades - who crosses cultures with ease. He is the child of a homesteader, an Indian captive, adopted missionary son, husband, storeowner, gunslinger, paramour, and the revisionist voice of Western history on film. His unfettered ability to move between worlds emancipates viewers from Westerns past as he turns minister and gunslinger alike into caricatures. Crabb spans the entire period of American cinema, ends in a veterans' elderly care facility, and is a career find for a budding historian.
Hoffman gives a stellar performance as the vessel through which these identities pass and through which strands of antiwar and adversarial counterculture wisdom tie together. Yet the critical component of Hoffman's significance as a point of reference is in legitimating the Native American. "Now you just sit there and you'll learn something," Crabb tells the interviewer. "I knowed General George Armstrong Custer for what he was and I also knowed the Indians for what they was." If the graduate student and viewer are ready, Crabb's story will provide the raw evidence in the search for truth about the American West. "My name is Jack Crabb, and I am the sole white survivor."
Arthur Penn brought "on-location" realism to Little Big Man (1970), intending to de-Hollywoodize the Western; the two actors, Dustin Hoffman (as Jack Crabb) and Chief Dan George (as Old Lodge Skins), show the thin line between representation and "telling it like it is" (Photofest).
To begin, Penn reacquaints viewers with traditional cinematic images. The film opens to a slow pan of the desolate, dry plains of the West. Viewers see from a low angle torched wagons and dead bodies. Jack picks up his narrative in voice-over and takes viewers back a hundred and eleven years. "My family crossin' the Great Plains was wiped out by a band of wild Indians," he explains. The "murderin' varmints," as he calls them, were the Pawnees. The story then shifts. It is the present in film time and the moment after destruction. Young Jack (Ray Dimas) and sister Caroline eye the destruction, mourn the death of their parents, and then run for cover under a tattered tarp. Audiences suspect a traditional narrative when they see a lone warrior, Shadow that Comes in Sight (Ruben Moreno), riding toward them. Shadow flings the tarp back and terrifies the children. "Bye, Jack," Caroline says. "I'll see you in heaven." Appearing in war paint, Shadow threatens their lives with a raised tomahawk, then empathizes, and saves both children.
Indian representation in this first sequence deliberately imitates old Hollywood and then introduces its critical stance with the sympathetic Shadow. As he takes his captives into camp, the three of them ride past an Indian garbage dump and the reversals continue. Jack's sister Caroline is terrified that she will be raped but Crabb as narrator explains, "Poor Caroline never did have no luck with men." Caroline escapes the Cheyenne and the story focuses on Jack, who is adopted by the patriarch of the group, Old Lodge Skins, his new "granddaddy," and learns the way of tribal life.
Dustin Hoffman enters the screen after the first few sequences as a teenager, and the film begins its most memorable revision. With long, dark braids, bare torso, beaded choker, and buckskin pants, Hoffman rides his pinto into battle. He is part of the procession of Cheyenne who are fighting the U.S. military following a massacre of women and children at another Indian camp. Hoffman brings his star power and iconic authority onto the screen in what one critic noted as "memorable delicacy, humor, and humanity."6 Hoffman's humane persona legitimates the film's remorse over the clash between westward movement and Indian people. Jack's adoptive family provides the means for the film's social commentary while serving as the narrative authority who determines the value of what they say and do. "I wasn't just playing in it. I was living in it," he explains. His grandfather, Old Lodge Skins, compliments Hoffman's popular persona and together they begin the process of de-Hollywoodizing the feature screen.
The elderly Jack Crabb sets the moral tone of the film when he explains that the Cheyennes call themselves the Human Beings. The camera then takes viewers into the world of Old Lodge Skins, who makes clear that Jack was not born a Human Being since he was white. Yet, when the young boy lives the code of Human Beings by killing a Pawnee, he is converted and named. "His name shall be Little Big Man," the one whose body was small but "his bravery ... big," Grandfather officially declares. Jack the teenager enters Old Lodge Skins' tipi and the training begins. Of course, Crabb's character is pure fiction, but the inclusion of a fictitious white survivor in the Custer history of the Battle of Little Big Horn is exactly what makes Penn's version of history appealing and problematic. Crabb's imperative -"this is how it was"-breaks new ground because his story affirms the value of Indian perspective. At the same time, his authority to speak for Native Americans presumes an innocence that fosters a new "good" image to counter the Hollywood of negative portrayals.
Grandfather instructs Jack that "whites are the enemy" because their world is a place without a center. Jack rides with the Human Beings to war against those adversaries. Sequences show military raids, rifles against bows and arrows, and Old Lodge Skins' people being threatened. In the early scenes, the film encourages sympathy by dehumanizing the white world. During one of the military raids, for example, Jack is mistaken for a Cheyenne. He is about to be slaughtered but yells, "God bless George Washington; God bless my mother," and points out, "Indians wouldn't say that kind of stuff." The soldier who is about to kill him wipes paint off Jack's face and he is saved. Soon adopted into the household of Minister Silas Pendrake (Thayer David), he begins passing from one identity to the next throughout the coming episodes.
identities at the time was directed toward the industry's overemphasis on a generic American rather than on the real portrayal of a diverse society. Countering the assimilationist model by revising the Western made sense because of the genre's ubiquity.
Little Big Man, a.k.a. Jack Crabb, the title character of Arthur Penn's 1970 film, crosses between two societies by merely wiping paint off his face and yelling "God bless George Washington!" (Photofest).
By the time Penn began production on the movie, literary works humanizing Native Americans had already been circulating. Readers could access stories about Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull and read romantic adventures about Native Americans. Thomas Berger added to the changed discourse with his novel Little Big Man; others followed by the 1970s with such titles as Custer Died for Your Sins and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Film saw its revisionist strain with John Ford's Cheyenne Autumn in 1964 when Ford created a sympathetic view of Indians that viewers welcomed. "For once in a western [sic]," one film critic explained about Ford's product, "all the Indians looked like Indians," even if Sal Mineo and Ricardo Matalban played the lead roles.7
Such authors and filmmakers believed their works were "telling it like it is" and, in turn, advocating change in the larger society. Educators joined the conversation about a more just society. Education departments at universities developed new curricula during the latter sixties to teach empathy for "the other America," as one teaching guide labeled it. Popular books replaced traditional reading lists in high school English classes and teachers argued that the proper image for America should be a mosaic or tapestry where people mix but can still be distinct, rather than disappear in a melting pot. Two popular books, When the Legends Die and Laughing Boy, were widely taught and circulated as "knowledge" about Ute and Navajo life, respectively. In the first book, the main character changes from Bear's Brother to Thomas Black Bull to Killer Tom Black to Thomas Black to Tom Black Bull. He is the "recalcitrant problem teenager' in the reservation school who clings to the old ways" and finally comes to terms with himself and his heritage. According to these books, Indian heritage must be preserved. "When the legends die, the dream ends," the book claims. Other updated literary characters were "pure Navajo, untouched by the white world," as the teaching unit for Laughing Boy explained. By contrast, the teenage girl, who "has been severely damaged by her contact with whites," exemplifies the consequences of modernity. In these scenarios, the white world is alien and a threat. The discovery of identity in these stories brought the successful balance between the old world and the new.'
The ideal in these methods of activism was to adjust the view of society. Teaching materials explained that these resources could help "blacks, whites, Indians, Orientals, Mexicans, European immigrants ... to blend ... without destroying their separate cultures." Many wellmeaning instructors pointed out "the dream ... gone awry" and made students aware of ghettoes, reservation life, and inner city poverty.' Prospective teachers took bibliographies and new media listings compiled by Educational Media Centers into high schools. Students watched and critiqued film and read and discussed popular novels and other material, hoping to envision and understand experiences so they could help forge new social relations. Social activism was advanced by many Native Americans themselves through Red Power organizations such as the American Indian Movement (AIM), created in 1968. This group saw the American government as a danger to native lifestyle and culture." Other activists employed less militant methods and pressed courts to prohibit the misappropriation of Indian identity. The most obvious were sports team titles where the names of "The Chiefs" or "Redskins" typecast cultures.
Constructing new reference groups was one answer to changing social relations and altering the process of assimilation. Another was deconstructing icons by forging new narratives in mainstream cinema. To revise popularized myths and images oftentimes meant adjusting the meaning of conventional heroes who symbolized the purpose of American history. Like Berger before him, Penn addressed changing attitudes toward the American past and called for a more fair treatment of minority populations by adjusting the treatment of Native Americans in popular literature and film. The solution for Penn's project, at the same time, meant flipping the coin and dismantling any notion of heroism among the American troops moving United States borders into the West. One historical figure in American frontier history, George Custer, was a likely subject because he had long fascinated historians and popular culture enthusiasts.
As early as 1948 in Fort Apache, John Ford reinterpreted the Custer persona. By the late 1960s, Custer was cast as an arrogant egotist signifying the problem with America itself. This "once ... symbolic leader," as one historian wrote, "came to represent the supposed `moral bankruptcy' of Manifest Destiny."" The meaning of the real Custer took on large implications in Little Big Man because Penn's portrayal further facilitated what the book had begun. Custer functioned as the sacrificial offering for the representation of an adversarial perspective. This long-lived legend was about to be profaned in American popular culture once again.
The legend of Custer has been one of the most intriguing topics in the history of the American West because Custer's death and defeat in the centennial year of 1876 was controversial from the beginning. Was the battle to be understood as a gallant last stand or a moment of panic under Custer's command? Custer's defeat, as historian Richard White noted, was "hugely symbolic and a major shock." It was difficult for many "to imagine a warrior culture defeating a modern army."" The thirty-six-year-old lieutenant colonel already "had star power [and] media awareness" and almost instantaneously became a dashing character for popular culture." The mystery shrouding the battle lent itself to stories of heroism and sacrifice for a nation into the middle of the twentieth century.
