The mini-series makes one major detour from its literary source. It is alternately narrated by the voices of Elizabeth Custer, the general’s adoring wife, and Kate Bighead, an Indian woman who allegedly witnessed his early triumphs. The device seems a shamelessly transparent bid to lure female viewers, and it’s hardly the only one. Ten minutes into the story, Gary Cole (Custer) and Rosanna Arquette (Elizabeth) writhe through a bedroom scene so leeringly staged it could be a sendup of “Dallas.” Later, Kate Bighead treats us to a discourse on Sioux mating customs climaxed by a cutesy scene in which Crazy Horse gets plugged by his lover’s jealous husband in his own tepee. Tee-hee.
Mercifully, though, the mini-series soon catches its stride, capturing the epic sweep of the Plains Indian Wars with scrupulous authenticity. Filmed on location in Montana, “Son of the Morning Star” (the name the Crows bestowed on Custer for his frequent attacks at dawn) uses real Native Americans speaking in their own languages for every Native American role; voice-overs handle the translations. All their cultural trappings–costumes, makeup, weaponry, village life, even the glass beads they bartered for–emerge from history through meticulously exact research. This may be the grisliest production ever telecast. It displays a near-obsessive fascination with scalp removals, dismemberments and other sanguinary doings. Then again, so did Connell’s book.
Basically, however, the mini-series is a character study, and they don’t come any more complex. Gary Cole (“Fatal Vision,” “Midnight Caller”) gives us an almost pathologically contradictory Custer. We meet George the Despotic, flogging and even branding his men for minor infractions; George the Romantic, risking courtmartial to steal a brief night with his wife; George the Vain, primping his locks before a mirror with the care of a teenager on prom night, and George the Fearless, leading 225 troopers against an encampment of some 10,000 hostiles by whooping, “Boys, we’ve caught ’em napping!” The same man who casually caused the butcherings of Indian women and children put his career on the line by defending his adversaries against abuses by well-connected war profiteers. In the end, Cole’s Custer remains an enigma, yet at least he’s more interesting than Errol Flynn’s cartoonish swashbuckler in “They Died With Their Boots on” (and infinitely preferable to Ronald Reagan’s lovelorn simp in “Sante Fe Trail”).
As for the film’s treatment of the Native American, it’s nothing if not politically correct. In that sense, this is “Dances With Wolves” without Kevin Costner (who reportedly campaigned for the lead role when the project was in development at another network). The Indians even get most of the best lines. Arriving for a White House pow-wow, Chief Red Cloud is invited by President Grant to “set” in a chair. “I come from where the sun sets,” he ripostes, plopping onto the floor. “You were raised on chairs.” The meeting never recovers.
There are some mini-series, and this is one, in which small, human moments leave the most indelible impressions. Boyish members of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry play a rollicking baseball game on the vast plains and gallop to their deaths flaunting straw hats purchased on the steamer that carried them west. Following the Little Bighorn massacre, an equally young brave hesitantly saws off a scalp, gulps and retches into the grass. Nearby, elderly Cheyenne women silently strip uniforms from the corpses. Coming upon Custer, two of them–recalling that he had been warned not to war on them–gentle pierce his eardrums with sewing awls to improve his hearing in the next world.
Though hundreds of books have tried to explain it, no one really knows how Custer got himself into his legendary fix or what actually happened on that sweltering June day in 1876. But as this TV account makes ironically clear, Custer’s “last stand” applied to his conquerors as well. The massacre became a catalyst for the white man’s ruthless extermination of Native Americans in the years to come. That, in turn, suggests a second irony. According to the mini-series, President Grant ordered the destruction of the Indians’ war machine after earlier proclaiming–in words hauntingly similar to those of a contemporary president–that the world was “on the eve of a new harmony.” Like we said, “Son of the Morning Star” reeks with reverberations. But don’t let that deter you from auditing this enthralling history course.
