Little Big Man is a 1970 film starring Dustin Hoffman who plays 120 year old Jack Crabb recounting his adventures of his time with the Native American tribe,  the Cheyenne. The story starts with 10-year old Jack in a carriage that is destroyed with his parents being killed by the Pawnee tribe of Indians. From there, the Cheyenne tribe takes him and his sister back to their camp that his sister then escapes from. The Cheyenne then raise him as one of their own and when he is 16, he gains the name, “Little Big Man,” when he saves his rivals life due to his high confidence but small stature.

During a fight with the cavalry, Jack denies being a member of the Cheyenne to avoid being killed. From there he goes through several small adventures including getting adopted by a woman that makes advances on him, getting tarred and feathered by a woman that ends up being his sister, an attempt to become a gunslinger which fails when he realizes he doesn’t want to kill and he ends up co-owning a store with a man who leaves him bankrupt. Jack ends up getting recruited by General Custer who hires him to help lead an attack on the Cheyenne, but Jack turns on him when they start killing the men and women. Jack marries a Cheyenne woman named Sunshine who he has a kid with but both her and her kid are murdered by Custer’s army.  Jack eventually becomes the towns drunk but ends up deciding to kill Custer in retaliation for killing his wife and child.  Jack tricks Custer (shown below) into a trap set by the Cheyenne that ends up getting Custer killed.

The movie had some conventional and some unconventional elements to it. The cast was pretty conventional. Dustin Hoffman was a well known actor at this point for his role in The Graduate and Faye Dunaway was known for playing Bonnie in Bonnie and Clyde. The plot for this film however was widely unconventional. The director, Arthur Penn, said in an interview, “I was really a very hot director at that point and I could virtually do any film I wanted and I was still I was having damn too hard trouble getting Little Big Man made and I couldn’t figure out why…” (Penn, 1998). The reason why the film was so controversial when it came out was because while it was still the classic “Cowboys and Indians” story that had been told to death, this time they were making the cowboys the bad guys and the native americans the good guys. Penn commented on this in the same aforementioned interview saying, “It was because of a basic hollywood prejudice which is you don’t treat indians this way, they got to be the bad guys…” (Penn, 1998) By making the native americans the bad guys in the film, they were tackling the norms and that made the film unconventional.

The film also tackled controversies that were caused by the Vietnam war.  In this essay written by Kimberly Lindbergs, she states, “The director was also responding to the war in Vietnam that had led to well-publicized atrocities such as the My Lai Massacre that took place in 1968. ” (Lindbergs 2015) The My Lai Massacre was an incident where 500 people were killed in My Lai, a village in Vietnam, several of which were women and children that were raped. The movie tackled this in the scene where Jack’s wife is killed. Several of the women and children in the camp were killed and all so Custer could gain political power. By having these heinous acts committed by the villains of the movie mirror the acts committed by the US army the movie is commentating how villainous the US army acted during the Vietnam war.

Finally, I noticed in the film that tackled the issues of sensitivity to violence. Too often in movies and society people are desensitized to violence and feel that killing isn’t as bad as it seems due to stories normalizing it. A good example of this was the movie Bonnie and Clyde. The reason that the two main characters of that were portrayed as heroes was that people are so desensitized to violence it didn’t matter how many people they killed. Instead,  this film has Jack act truly sensitized to violence and not really wanting to kill anyone. After he kills the only person he kills in this movie (a Pawnee Indian attacking someone from his tribe),  the narrator says, “I always felt kind of bad about that poor Pawnee.” In addition, later in the film, when his friend kills someone in self-defense, Jack gives up being a gunslinger due to not wanting to hurt anyone.

The movie thrived by challenging norms and even challenged the US policies. By doing this, it allowed future movies to be able to challenge controversial topics like these and allow movies to advance in society.