A 19th-Century Forrest Gump

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"I was an honored guest so they gave me a special treat: boiled dog. Now I will admit, dog is greasy, but you'd be surprised how downright delicate the flavor is — especially when you're starving."

Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman)

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The last time I watched Arthur Penn's "Little Big Man" — which premiered on this day in 1970 — it occurred to me that Little Big Man (Dustin Hoffman) was the 19th–century version of Forrest Gump.

He was always where big things were happening in the West — just like Forrest Gump kept showing up at the White House ... after he showed up on the infamous occasion when George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door in an attempt to block the integration of the University of Alabama.

Forrest Gump was always rubbing elbows with the big names of 20th–century history, with presidents and would–be presidents, often in the news footage of the day. Little Big Man wasn't around too many big names. He was almost always around the practically anonymous Indians who tried without success to resist the invasion of the white Europeans.

The only big name I can think of who encountered Little Big Man was Gen. George Armstrong Custer (Richard Mulligan).

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Film critic Roger Ebert wrote that "Little Big Man" was "an endlessly entertaining attempt to spin an epic in the form of a yarn." He was right.

"It mostly works," Ebert observed. "When it doesn't — when there's a failure of tone or an overdrawn caricature — it regroups cheerfully and plunges ahead. We're disposed to go along; all good storytellers tell stretchers once in a while, and circle back to be sure we got the good parts."

In "Little Big Man," they were all good parts.

"Hoffman, or Little Big Man, gets around pretty well," Ebert wrote. "He touches all the bases of the Western myth. He was brought West as a settler, raised as a Cheyenne, tried his hand at gunfighting and medicine shows, scouted for the cavalry, experimented with the hermit life, was married twice, survived Custer's Last Stand and sat at the foot of an old man named Old Lodge Skins (Chief Dan George), who instructed him in the Cheyenne view of creation."

And that, in a nutshell, was Little Big Man's character — except he answered to Jack Crabb when he came West as a settler or when he found himself among other whites.

The "yarn," as Ebert put it, was told by Hoffman's character at the age of 121. Yes, you read that right. And it worked quite well. Extremely well.

"The yarn is the most flexible of story forms," Ebert observed. "Its teller can pause to repeat a point; he can hurry ahead 10 years; he can forget an entire epoch in remembering the legend of a single man. He doesn't capture the history of a time, but its flavor. 'Little Big Man' gives us the flavor of the Cheyenne nation before white men brought uncivilization to the West."

It would be hard to pinpoint what kind of movie it was. It was a comedy, a drama, a satire, a tragedy. Sometimes it was just one; at other times, it was a mix of two or more.

One thing it was not was literal history.

And Ebert observed that the story was circular. "All the characters who appear in the early stages of the film come back in the later stages, fulfilled. The preacher's wife (Faye Dunaway) returns as a prostitute. The medicine–quack, already lacking an arm, loses a leg (physician, heal thyself). Wild Bill Hickok decays from a has–been to a freak show attraction. Custer fades from glory to madness. Only Old Lodge Skins makes it through to the end not merely intact but improved."

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The really ridiculous thing about "Little Big Man" is how it was all but overlooked by the Oscars.

Chief Dan George was nominated for Best Supporting Actor (which he lost) — and that was it. Even the schmaltzy "Love Story" got seven nominations.

Well, it wasn't the first time that a more deserving movie got snubbed by the Oscars.

The Kids Weren't All Right

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There was nothing remarkable about Dec. 3, 1979 — until after the sun went down.

Actually, I wasn't living in Cincinnati on that date. I was living in Arkansas, and my thoughts never went to Cincinnati that day, as far as I can recall. But my thoughts went to Cincinnati frequently in the days that followed.

On this night in 1979, 11 young people were crushed to death in a crowd surge for unreserved seats at Cincinnati's Riverfront Coliseum before a concert featuring The Who. In the end, it was the practice of "festival seating" — first come, first served for the best spots — at rock concerts in those days that was blamed for the tragedy.

It didn't help that access to the interior of the stadium was restricted as well. Some of the entries to the stadium were locked to prevent people from sneaking in. There were also rumors at the time that unions may have played a role in that.

The victims ranged in age from 15 to 27. The youngest would have turned 50 this year. The oldest would have been in her 60s and, presumably, about to retire. Entire lifetimes were taken from them that night — marriages, families, careers.

It isn't hard to imagine the chain of events that unfolded that night. Under the festival seating policy, you paid for your tickets, then you had two choices — if you wanted to be as close to the stage as possible. You could get to the stadium very early and stand in line at the gate, regardless of the weather conditions — and it was brutally cold that night, as I remember hearing in news reports — or you could make a dash for the door when it was opened, muscling your way past others and possibly (probably) provoking a fight.

I have always thought there was an element of the latter in the Cincinnati tragedy, but there was more.

The band was doing a sound check when the doors were opened, but not everyone realized what was happening. Many of the people who had been standing in line in the freezing weather thought the concert had already begun, and they rushed the place. They didn't want to miss anything.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, a lot of attention was paid to the festival seating policy — and it took a lot of blame, as it should have. The city banned the practice, a ban that remained in effect for 25 years.

But that didn't excuse the general handling of things that night by stadium personnel — who should have done anything in their power to prevent the stampede that occurred when the band's late sound check convinced some concertgoers that the show had already begun. That failure was like tossing a lit match on a pile of gasoline–soaked rags.

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As is so often the case, some good came from the unspeakably bad that occurred that night. Tragedy has a way of shining a bright light on shortcomings that were hidden in the dark before — but, unfortunately, the light doesn't always shine in appropriate proportions.

In the case of Cincinnati, disproportionate attention was paid to the practice of festival seating. There can be little doubt that the practice played a role in what happened, but so, too, did inadequate crowd control.

It must have been an horrific experience. Many of the victims were knocked from their feet and literally trampled by the crowd. Those who survived being knocked to the concrete floor reported that they could not get to their feet and their cries for help went unheeded or ignored. Other victims reported being lifted from the ground by the force of the crowd.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, venues across the country changed their rules about festival seating with many switching to assigned seating, but that was a decision that was made by the venues alone. Cincinnati, perhaps more sensitive than other cities because of what happened there 35 years ago today, was the only U.S. municipality to ban the practice at any venue within the city limits. (That ban was lifted 10 years ago because it was preventing the city's venues from booking quality concerts.)

I've always felt that was an overreaction. Festival seating needed to be addressed, to be sure, but so did the issue of crowd control. After all, things didn't turn tragic until the fans heard the sound check and, thinking the concert had begun, surged toward still–closed doors, in the process trampling most of the victims.

Without adequately addressing the issue of crowd control, measures that were taken, however well intended, had the safety value of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.