Arthur Penn: New Edition

Arthur Penn in Canada

Shooting Little Big Man Arthur Penn’s seventh film, due for release in the winter of 1970, is Little Big Man, from a novel by Thomas Berger.5 The screenplay is by Calder Willingham, the cameraman is Harry Stradling Jr., and the stars are Dustin Hoffman, Faye Dunaway, Richard Boone, and Martin Balsam. The film is in Panavision, a big production financed by CBS, and will probably run for about two hours, forty minutes— Penn’s longest and most expensive film to date.6 Shooting was completed in the winter of 1969, and at the time of writing, Penn and the indispensable Dede Allen are “extracting” the film from “the basic raw material” (his own description of the editing process).7 Berger’s novel is about a white boy called Jack Crabb (Hoffman) brought up for five years by the Cheyennes (with whom he earns the name Little Big Man), then shuttled by circumstances back and forth between the Cheyennes and the whites. Crabb, who claims to be the only white survivor of Custer’s Last Stand at the Little Big Horn, tells the story himself in rambling reminiscence, at the age of 111 (in the film this is updated to 121). His narrative forms a picaresque, freely episodic novel of over four hundred pages, characterized by a brutal and ironic humor, encompassing most of the half-historic, half-legendary figures of the West—Custer, Wyatt Earp, Kit Carson, Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Buffalo Bill—as well as numerous fictitious characters, both Indian and white. In the course of the narrative, Crabb acquires two wives, one white (a Swedish girl called Olga), one Cheyenne (Sunshine ). The book’s most interesting achievement is, through Crabb’s alternation between the white and Indian worlds, the development Shooting Little Big Man 95 within a single consciousness of a dual outlook—white world seen through Indian eyes, Indian through white. This may be difficult to realize in cinematic terms, perhaps, though both Penn and his producer, Stuart Millar, hope that something of it will emerge. Calder Willingham’s script seems admirable qua screenplay: spare and skeletal, providing a firm structure and strong dialogue but with no pretensions to self-sufficiency, leaving the essential creation of each scene to the director. It is a remarkable feat of compression and reorganization . Of the semihistoric figures, all but Custer and Hickok have been eliminated; elsewhere, while the alternating rhythm of the narrative has been retained, its structure has been tightened by the telescoping of certain characters so that in the film an earlier character recurs, whereas in the novel an entirely new one appears. For example, in place of Crabb’s niece Amelia, whom he rescues from a brothel in the last third of the novel, the film brings back Mrs. Pendrake (Dunaway ), Crabb’s white “mother” by adoption who very quickly reveals erotic designs on him. This substitution, which apparently has Berger’s enthusiastic assent, provides a very logical development for the Mrs. Pendrake of the earlier scenes. Faye Dunaway’s part nonetheless remains relatively small: it is Little Big Man’s film, and Hoffman appears in every scene. Another change, while less immediately striking, seems even more important. In Berger’s novel, Little Big Man remains to the end an essentially passive figure: even when he is jolted into deliberate activity , as he is by the abduction of his Swedish wife by Indians, he fails to sustain his purpose. In the script, he gradually develops a strong emotional commitment to the Indian cause and by the end is a far more conscious and positive figure than he ever becomes in the book, although, this being a Penn film, he affects the outcome of events only in a confused and ironic way. The change first becomes noticeable in the protagonist’s attitude to buffalo hunting: in the book he joins in the slaughter of buffalo for hides quite without conscience; in the script he is invited and refuses, acknowledging the dependence of the Indians on the buffalo herds for meat. The script builds to a passionate 96 robin wood protest at what was done to the Indians. One might criticize this for making explicit what in the novel is expressed very obliquely, through irony. yet I think it will emerge logically from the film. Where the script can be faulted is in the partial softening of the Cheyenne character , though more by omission...