With the death of the criminally overlooked film director Arthur Penn this week, there will no doubt be chapter and verse written about his "Bonnie and Clyde" and its enduring impact on American cinema.  And nothing I could write here could possibly expand on what will be written in that regard. 

Arthur Penn

Instead, let me offer just a few words about the most devilishly subversive and comedic of all Penn's films, and a personal favorite of mine; the caustic yet wildly entertaining "Little Big Man."

If you've never seen it, "Little Big Man" is a little like "Dances with Wolves" on acid.  Or maybe "How the West Was Won" as imagined by Harold Ramis and Doug Kenney.  It weaves an epic tale about the American West and in the process exposes us to history's dark and often pungent underbelly -- while somehow managing to give us one laugh after another in the process.

Telling the life story of a Forrest Gump-like centenarian named Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman), Penn introduces us to not only such iconic western types as the lying snake oil salesman and the lustful, sexually repressed preacher's wife, but a whole cast of unlikely and refreshingly unique characters, like the openly gay Cheyenne warrior. 

He also impishly pulls back the curtain on such low-hanging fruit as those mythical Western icons, Buffalo Bill Cody and General George Custer, while at the same time humanizing Native Americans in a way few films up to that point, serious or otherwise, had ever had the courage to do.

But much like "Bonnie and Clyde," it's virtually impossible to talk about "Little Big Man" without also talking about the era in which it was made. 

Dustin Hoffman, Faye Dunaway in Little Big Man

By 1970, America's involvement in Viet Nam was spiraling out of control to the point that many people, including many in the conservative heartland, had started to openly question its wisdom.  After all, by then the broadcast networks had been giving any American with a television and a set of rabbit ears a decade's worth of irrefutable evidence that when two nations get together to fight a war things don't always go according to plan. 

Not only that, but during a war -- any war -- when it comes to the physical act of killing , it's often hard to tell who's the good guy and who's the bad guy.

The America of 1970 was, in other words, no longer a nation of innocents.  We had not only watched the Viet Nam War escalate in living color right there on our shiny new RCA's, we had born witness to three unspeakable Viet Nam-related horrors, each in its own way as gruesome as the next: the Tet Offensive, the shootings at Kent State, and perhaps most important in the context of Penn's film, the brutal massacre of some 500 civilians -- most of them women, children and elderly people -- in the tiny village of Mai Lai.

So when "Little Big Man" was released two days before Christmas in 1970, and had the temerity to depict the U.S. Cavalry as callous and bloodthirsty "ethnic cleansers," it did more than raise eyebrows.  It absolutely infuriated those on the conservative right, while at the same time horrifying many on the opposite end of the political spectrum.

It might seem incongruous to say that a movie somehow made people laugh and appalled them at the same time, but that's exactly what "Little Big Man" managed to do.  For that reason and others, while it did eventually make money, it was not a huge financial success.  Nor did it garner much attention come Oscar time.  Only Chief Dan George as the wise old tribal leader received a nomination, and he went home empty-handed.

Oscar nominee Chief Dan George, right

Years later, the American Film Institute gave Penn a measure of satisfaction, I would imagine, by nominating "Little Big Man" for inclusion on its list of most important films of all time.  But by then Penn's directing career was all but over.  He had been shunned by mainstream Hollywood, couldn't get work, and was riding out his years as a talking head, taken out of mothballs only when some television producer needed a few minutes with one of the elder statesmen of the maverick American cinematic vanguard.

Looking back, I guess what I still like best about "Little Big Man" is its rich humor and its wonderfully wry narrative style.  The performances are terrific too, and at times it appears as though everyone on screen is having as much fan as an actor can have while still being in character.

But I also can't help but be impressed by the daring and bravado that Penn showed in so utterly re-telling much of the hallowed history of the American West.  1970 was a turbulent and trying year in America, and he not only took on some of the tallest trees in our collective memory, he did so with the tiniest of axes.   Lucky for him it was a sharp one.

I respect Penn too because he had the balls to not only hold a mirror up to America (a country he clearly loved and understood deeply) but to challenge its people to take a good hard look.  And sad as it is to say, at the time he did that  there were far too many of us absolutely incapable (or perhaps unwilling) to face the murky truth we found staring back at us. 

In retrospect, that America didn't like what it saw in Penn's mirror seemed to say more about who we were as a country than it did about him as a filmmaker.  After all, he did his job, and did it well.  We just didn't seem ready for his brand of cynical and ironic truth-telling.  In retrospect,  I really wish we had shown as much courage watching "Little Big Man" as Penn did in making it.

But hey, that's history's right?  And history gets written by the winners. 

Plus, if history has taught us anything it is this: when the news gets bad enough sometimes the easiest thing to do is simply disregard the message and kill the messenger.

Or in the case of  a maverick storyteller named Arthur Penn, the messenger's career.