Little Big Man  

By Marshall Fine

Jack Crabb is the only white survivor of the Battle of Little Big Horn and the centenarian shares his story in this picaresque fable of the Old West. In Arthur Penn's adaptation of Thomas Berger's novel, Dustin Hoffman plays Jack from teen years into old age in a bravura performance. And Jack's story is a fantastic one: captured by Indians as a boy, reared as an Indian, shuttling back and forth between the white and Indian worlds. In the process, he befriends everyone from Wild Bill Hickock to George Armstrong Custer and is a gunslinger, a snake-oil salesman, and an Army scout. This is a solid blend of comedy and tragedy, with a strong statement to make about America's treatment of Native Americans without sermonizing. A terrific cast includes Faye Dunaway, Martin Balsam, and Richard Mulligan. But this show is all Hoffman's.

Academy Awards

Little Big Man received an Academy Awards nomination for Supporting Actor (Chief Dan George).

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""Little Big Man" (1970) is the neglected masterpiece of American cinema's greatest era. As pictorially beautiful as any John Ford western, as thematically intricate as director Arthur Penn's acclaimed 1967 masterwork "Bonnie and Clyde," as satrically precise as Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove" and as sweeping and epigrammatic as "Forrest Gump," this is the single most moving and entertaining western ever made from the American Indian's point of view. Boasting Dustin Hoffman's finest performance, Penn's best directing, and an absolutely heartbreaking supporting turn from Chief Dan George, this is a movie not to be missed. You'll never think about the American west the same way again, and that, my friend, is the whole point. Oh, and Richard Mulligan's Custer is the most harrowing depiction of an American military man since George C. Scott played Buck Turgensen for Kubrick." --machineart