Hollywood & the Indians Part II: Custer Died (Again & Again) For Your Sins

John Ford spent two-and-a-half hours apologizing for the Hollywood stereotype of the American Indian in his last western, "Cheyenne Autumn" (1964). Kevin Costner nobly attempted to reconcile the transgressions of the white man in either three or four hours, depending on which special edition DVD of "Dances With Wolves" (1990) you’re watching. Before and since, various filmmakers, on either end of the peace pipe, have tried to make viewers feel guilty for the sins of the fathers.

In fact, long before Europeans put a foot on North American soil, the indigenous peoples had a long history of bloody disputes over land ownership. The avaricious appetite for real estate was not exclusive of American Indians. Nevertheless, whenever Native American sympathizers want to dish up a heaping plate of guilt, we are reminded of the singular example of George Armstrong Custer.

A Civil War general at 26 (albeit a brevet promotion - at war’s end he was returned to his rank of lieutenant colonel), George Custer tried to emulate his heroic feats of combat in his campaigns against Indians. His vainglorious ambition to secure a place in history books was achieved, ironically, when he and 267 men of the 7th Cavalry were slaughtered by over 1000 Sioux and Cheyenne at the Little Big Horn in eastern Montana Territory on June 25, 1876.

By 1926, the tale of the Little Big Horn had been depicted on the silent screen several times, beginning with "Custer’s Last Stand (On the Little Big Horn)," filmed in 1909, a mere 33 years after the fact. The cast of extras included three Sioux who were present at the battle. The producer anticipated unique insight from them but said later that "the most we could get out of them was that the fighting was over so quickly that they could remember little about it." The 1912 silent "Custer’s Last Fight" starred Francis Ford, older brother of director John Ford, as the doomed cavalry officer.

But 1926 was the 50th anniversary of the defeat, and more dramatizations were cranked out, including "With General Custer at the Little Big Horn." (Producers weren’t big on concise, to-the-point titles back then.) The year 1926 was also the 20th anniversary of Universal Pictures, and studio head Carl Laemmle wanted to make the biggest Custer movie of them all. "The Flaming Frontier" proved to be Universal’s most expensive production of the year, with a reported budget in excess of $400,000 (about four-and-a-half million dollars in today’s economy).

The midnight premiere of "The Flaming Frontier" in New York City attracted an audience of 1800, among them movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn, Al Jolson, and the Marx Brothers. The guest of honor was 85-year-old retired Brigadier General Edward S. Godfrey, who, a half century earlier, commanded Troop K of the 7th Cavalry at the Little Big Horn. After fending off Indian attacks awaiting General Alfred Terry’s relief column, Godfrey arrived at the massacre site and helped supervise the identification and burial of the dead. Coincidentally, Custer’s widow Elizabeth resided in New York City at the time, but it’s not known if she attended the premiere.

New York critics hailed the picture as "a glorious Western" and "a great spectacle full of thrills." Sadly, the film became one of several lost treasures of the country’s early cinema.

"Custer’s Last Stand" was the title of a 15-episode, five-and-a-half hour serial produced in 1936. In Cecil B. DeMille’s 1936 saga of the old west, "The Plainsman," Custer made an appearance in a collection of frontier notables, including Wild Bill Hickock (played by Gary Cooper), Buffalo Bill Cody and Calamity Jane. Thirty years later, Universal Pictures churned out a poverty-row remake wherein Custer was played by future "Naked Gun" klutz Leslie Nielsen.

Released in 1940, "Santa Fe Trail" had little to do with the famed passageway and much less to do with historical accuracy by presenting an 1854 graduating class at West Point including future Civil War figures J.E.B. Stuart (star Errol Flynn), George A. Custer, Robert E. Lee, Philip Sheridan, James Longstreet, George Pickett, and James Hood. Custer, as a matter of fact, would have been an adolescent of 15 at the time. Ronald Reagan seemed an unlikely candidate to portray Custer, who trades very 1940s-style wisecracks with romantic rival Flynn.

A more likely choice to play Custer would have been Errol Flynn, and indeed in 1941, he starred in "They Died With Their Boots On." Hollywood’s typical historical liberties didn’t prevent it from becoming one of the top grossing films of the year. For the battle at the Little Big Horn only 16 of the extras were Sioux Indians. The rest were Filipino. Sensing that the climactic scene would be dangerous, Anthony Quinn, who played Crazy Horse, jokingly ordered a hearse to the location on the day of shooting. Unfortunately, two extras did die during the filming.

This was the last of eight movies that teamed Flynn with Olivia de Havilland (as Custer’s wife Elizabeth). They had become a screen couple as endearing as William Powell and Myrna Loy or Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan. The parting scene as Custer goes off to his fate was the last scene they would share, and that fact made the moment especially touching.

Henry Fonda’s role as a hard-nosed, embittered martinet named Lieutenant Colonel Owen Thursday in John Ford’s "Fort Apache" (1948) was obviously patterned after Custer. Likewise, the fictional megalomaniac General McCabe, as played by dependable character actor Andrew Duggan in the Sam Peckinpah-scripted "The Glory Guys" (1965), was a blatant facsimile of Custer.

The 1950s and early ‘60s produced very little relating to Custer. The screenwriter for "The Great Sioux Massacre" (1965) was credited as Fred C. Dobbs, the name of the greedy bum who would do anything for gold, played by Humphrey Bogart, in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre." This modest but mediocre retelling of Custer’s Last Stand starred Philip Carey, best remembered as the much flustered Captain Parmalee of the Texas Rangers on the ‘60s series "Laredo" and later as Asa Buchanan on "One Life to Live."

Robert Shaw cut an appropriately dashing and flamboyantly arrogant figure in "Custer of the West" (1967), a Cinerama epic filmed in Spain. Cinerama was a widescreen process that simultaneously projected images from three synchronized projectors onto a huge, deeply curved screen. "How the West Was Won" (1962) and "It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" (1963) were two of the most popular features in Cinerama, which died out in the early 1970s. The widescreen effect enhanced the action sequences in "Custer of the West," particularly the sprawling canvas of the final battle. Interestingly, this was originally to be made by the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa.

A Canadian actor named Wayne Maunder starred in the shortlived 1967 series "Custer." Like several other TV series of the period, the show was expanded to a theatrical release called "The Legend of Custer" (aka - DVD buyers beware - "Crazy Horse & Custer"), destined, no doubt, to be the second feature at a drive-in theater.

Custer made a screen comeback in a big way in 1970, personified in full-tilt egomaniacal grandeur by Richard Mulligan (later, of course, the star of TV’s "Soap" and "Empty Nest") in director Arthur Penn’s alternately comic and tragic epic, "Little Big Man," starring Dustin Hoffman as 121-year-old Jack Crabb. The climax of this one-of-a-kind film takes place at the Little Big Horn, but midway into the picaresque tale, in a thinly veiled allusion to the Vietnam War (a common thread throughout several ‘70s films), Custer leads an attack on a Cheyenne village on the Washita River in Wyoming, a battle the real Custer would claim resulted in the deaths of 120 Indian warriors, while other accounts maintained the camp consisted largely of women and children. Crabb recalls the massacre as "an act of genocide."

Richard Mulligan’s fanatical take on Custer might have been the inspiration for a later interpretation in "The Legend of the Golden Gun," a 1979 TV movie, starring Hal Holbrook, that plays like a tongue-in-cheek western fairy tale. Any film that features a frontier saloon festooned with caricatures of famous outlaws and lawmen (like Sardi’s Restaurant in New York’s theater district) isn’t asking to be taken seriously. Keir Dullea ("2001: A Space Odyssey") appears in this fantasy as a Custer who bears a striking resemblance to World War II General Douglas MacArthur, complete with tinted spectacles and corncob pipe. Written by James Parriott, who later created the series "Forever Knight," the little-seen movie has retained a cult following despite its regrettable unavailability on DVD.

A 1977 Hallmark Hall of Fame TV production of "The Court-Martial of George Armstrong Custer" was based on Douglas C. Jones’ best-selling novel that speculated Custer’s survival at the Little Big Horn and his subsequent trial for negligence. Workmanlike actor James Olson ("Commando") played Custer, with Ken Howard (TV’s "The White Shadow") and Brian Keith as opposing attorneys. Custer’s wife Elizabeth was portrayed by Blythe Danner, 2006 Emmy winner in the drama series "Huff."

"The Legend of the Lone Ranger" (1981), a box office turkey infamous for the fact that star Klinton Spilsbury’s dialogue was so bad his voice had to be re-dubbed by actor James Keach, featured the standard array of western legends in cameo parts, including Custer, Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickock (Richard Farnsworth).

Custer appeared as a character in three episodes of the 1990s series "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman." In the 1996 TV movie "Crazy Horse," Custer was played by Peter Horton, of TV’s "thirtysomething." And Custer was a perfunctory figure in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 12-hour miniseries, "Into the West."

Kevin Costner was supposed to have starred in the 1991 three-hour television adaptation of Evan S. Connell’s best-selling "Son of the Morning Star." NBC-TV even had a "Costner Is Custer" advertising campaign ready to roll until Costner was delayed by another film project. Gary Cole, recognizable to many as the hemming-and-hawing Bill Lumbergh in "Office Space" and as Vice President Bob Russell on "The West Wing," has cited his performance as Custer one of his favorites. He brought layers of three-dimensional complexity and all too human contradictions to the role that had been lacking in previous presentations.

This is, incidentally, the only version that gives fair attention to Custer’s younger brothers Tom (himself the recipient of two Congressional Medals of Honor during the Civil War) and Boston, both of whom also perished at the Little Big Horn.

The scenes between Gary Cole and Rosanna Arquette as Elizabeth "Libbie" Custer reveal the heartfelt intimacy of a love story unexplored since the Errol Flynn - Olivia de Havilland pairing in "They Died With Their Boots On." Their final goodbye before he rides to his destiny is particularly heartbreaking.

In real life, the Custers shared a remarkable romance. His military career was temporarily detoured in 1867 when he was court-martialed for being AWOL, having abandoned his post only to be with his wife.

After President Grant publicly blamed Custer for the Little Big Horn debacle, Elizabeth launched a tireless, one-woman campaign to revitalize her husband’s image, writing articles, making speaking engagements and penning three books that successfully glorified his memory. Libbie remained resolutely faithful to her husband and never remarried. She died in New York City in 1933, a few days before her 91st birthday.