The movie is “Little Big Man,” 1970’s very strange, sui generis, Western satire/drama anti-Vietnam film that visits Western movie tropes, warps history, and mixes horror with humor. I was second-guessing my leaving it out of “Twenty-Five Indispensable Movies For Understanding American Culture,” so I decided to watch it again.
Is it “Little Big Man”anti-American? I don’t know: the film certainly shows our culture’s admirable ability to engage in self-criticism and reflection fearlessly when it is called for. None of the other films on the list deal sufficiently with the U.S.’s conflicted feelings about Native Americans and their unjust but unavoidable fate. That’s too big an issue to leave off the list.
Ethics Alarms 
My husband and I rewatched “Little Big Man” this past week, probably because it had been made a freebie on YouTube. From the trailers for Netflix’s remake of “Little House on the Prairie,” it sounds like Season 1 of that series will include a very sympathetic treatment of the Osage Indians native to the area where the Ingalls family moved in Book 3 of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s series of children’s books. I remember from having read the series to my kids that Pa Ingalls had heard that the area had been opened to “paleface” settlement; however, at the end of the book “Little House on the Prairie,” the Ingalls family and their neighbors learned that they had been mistaken and had come too early, so Pa packed up his family and their belongings back into the covered wagon and took them to Minnesota instead (which at least was still on the West side of the Mississippi from their original home in the Big Woods of Wisconsin).
Another film I am tempted to add: “Bad Day at Black Rock.”
Odd coincidence re your post…We just visited Wilder’s last homesite (with her last two houses, where she wrote the books) at her Rocky Ridge Farm in Mansfield, Missouri today (Saturday, 11th), while on a road trip from Georgia with our two elementary school age granddaughters. Neither have read the books, or seen the TV series, but I’m sure they will now.
In a totally different sort of tribute to Americana, we spent most of the rest of the day at the Bass Pro Shop/ aquarium/ museum at Springfield Missouri, which has to be one of the wonders of the commercial world. If German Freddy and his World Cup travelers were impressed with the regular Bass Pro they visited, they’d have lost their minds at seeing this place.