A preacher’s wife in a world turned upside down
In Little Big Man, released in 1970 and directed by Arthur Penn, Faye Dunaway plays Louise Pendrake, the wife of Reverend Silas Pendrake, who takes in the young Jack Crabb after he is captured by cavalry soldiers and separated from the Cheyenne people who raised him. Jack, played by Dustin Hoffman, has already lived two lives by the age of sixteen: first as a white settler child, then as a Cheyenne boy. The Pendrake household is supposed to return him to white, Christian respectability. Dunaway’s Louise has other ideas, or at least other desires. She is a sexually frustrated, restless woman trapped in a pious household, and she sees in Jack a chance for excitement, affection, and a kind of revenge against the dullness of her marriage.
Dunaway plays Louise with a mixture of comedy and sadness that prevents the character from becoming a simple joke. She is funny when she flirts with Jack, when she complains about her husband’s coldness, and when she treats religion as a set of rules to be bent rather than obeyed. But Dunaway also lets us see the loneliness underneath the flirtation. Louise is not a villain. She is a woman whose intelligence and appetite have no proper outlet in the world she inhabits, and she makes bad choices because the good ones are not available to her. When Jack discovers her with another man and leaves the household, Dunaway does not ask us to condemn Louise, nor to excuse her. She asks us to understand her, which is a harder and more interesting task.
Penn, Hoffman, and a revisionist Western
Little Big Man was Arthur Penn’s follow-up to Bonnie and Clyde, and it reunited him with Dunaway in a very different kind of film. Based on Thomas Berger’s novel, it tells Jack Crabb’s long life as a tall tale, narrated by the 121-year-old Jack to a sceptical historian. The film moves from Cheyenne camps to army forts, from snake-oil shows to the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and it uses comedy and tragedy to question the heroic myths of the American West. Penn was interested in how history is told, who gets to tell it, and what gets left out. Dunaway’s episode is a small but important part of that argument, because the Pendrake household represents one version of civilisation: orderly, religious, respectable, and quietly hypocritical.
Opposite Hoffman, Dunaway is a lively foil. Hoffman plays Jack as a survivor who adapts to every world he enters, learning its language and its lies. Louise is one of his first teachers in white hypocrisy, and Dunaway makes the lessons memorable. She shows Jack that piety can coexist with desire, that a respectable home can be a place of secrets, and that leaving is sometimes the only honest choice. Later in the film, when Jack meets Louise again, now working under the name Lulu, the reunion is comic and melancholy at once. Dunaway plays it without nostalgia. Louise has survived, as Jack has, by changing her name and her circumstances, and the film treats that survival as both a joke and a small triumph.
Comedy with a sharp edge
Much of Little Big Man is deliberately funny, even when its subject is violent or tragic. Penn uses that humour to make the audience uncomfortable, because laughter can be a way of avoiding the harder truths about conquest, massacre, and betrayal. Dunaway understands that tone perfectly. Her scenes with Thayer David, who plays the Reverend Pendrake as a stern, humourless man, are played as domestic farce, but the farce has a point. The reverend preaches morality while ignoring his wife’s unhappiness, and Louise responds by turning the household’s rules inside out. Dunaway’s timing in those scenes is excellent: a glance, a pause, a sudden burst of honesty that catches Jack, and the audience, off guard.
It is worth noting that Dunaway was actually younger than Hoffman, despite playing a woman who adopts, in effect, a teenage boy. Penn and Dunaway turn that odd casting into a strength, because Louise is not a maternal figure in any conventional sense. She is a young woman married to an older, colder man, and her interest in Jack is complicated, immature, and recognisably human. Dunaway does not soften that complication. She lets Louise be selfish and funny and sad, and she trusts the audience to hold those qualities together. That trust is characteristic of her best work in this period, when New Hollywood films were willing to let heroines be difficult.
A small role with a long shadow
Louise Pendrake is not the largest role in Little Big Man, and Dunaway does not dominate the film the way she dominates Bonnie and Clyde or Network. That is part of its interest. In an ensemble that includes Chief Dan George as Old Lodge Skins, Martin Balsam as the snake-oil salesman Allardyce Merriweather, and Richard Mulligan as a vain, unhinged General Custer, Dunaway contributes a vivid, self-contained episode that helps explain Jack’s journey. Without the Pendrakes, Jack’s later scepticism about white civilisation would be less convincing. He has seen its private face, in a respectable home, and he has learned that respectability can be a performance.
The film’s reputation has grown over time, as audiences have come to appreciate its ambition and its willingness to tell American history from the perspective of its victims as well as its victors. Dunaway’s contribution is sometimes overlooked in discussions of the film, which tend to focus on Hoffman and Chief Dan George, but her scenes repay attention. She gives the film one of its most human moments of comedy, and one of its clearest examples of how Penn used familiar actors in unfamiliar ways. A star who had just played Bonnie Parker and Vicki Anderson was now playing a frustrated preacher’s wife in a Western, and she did it without vanity or condescension.
Why Louise Pendrake endures
Louise endures because she is funny without being a caricature, and sad without being a victim. She wants more from life than her marriage offers, she makes a mess of getting it, and she survives. Dunaway plays her with the same intelligence she brought to her more famous roles, but with a lighter, more mischievous touch. In a film about grand historical myths, Louise is a reminder that history is also made in kitchens and bedrooms, by people trying, often clumsily, to live with desires they are not supposed to have.
Watch Little Big Man for its epic sweep and its revisionist anger, but watch Dunaway for the domestic comedy at its heart. Notice how she makes Louise’s restlessness feel both particular and universal, and how she leaves the character with her dignity intact, even when her choices are foolish. It is a supporting performance in the best sense: it supports the film’s argument, enriches its hero’s journey, and stays in the memory long after the battle scenes have ended.