Wuchak Released in 1970 and directed by Arthur Penn, "Little Big Man" is narrated by 121 year-old Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman), who details a tall tale of his colorful exploits in the Old West. Events include: Growing up with the Cheyanne, his adoptive family/tribe; a religious period with a striking hypocritical woman (Faye Dunaway); working as a snake oil huckster; living as a (funny) gunslinger who meets Wild Bill Hickok (Jeff Corey); working for General Armstrong Custer (Richard Mulligan); his many conversations with this loving adoptive grandfather (Chief Dan George); and many more.This is a historically significant Western, coming out at the height (and twilight) of the hippie movement, and the movie reflects this. The first act is great because it's so different, mixing comedy with drama. There are some genuinely amusing moments. As far as production values go, this was top-of-the-line for 1970. For instance, young Hoffman convincingly passes for a crotchety old man. Unfortunately, the second and final acts definitely meander, likely because Crabb is rambling out his (dubious) life story. This is the main reason for my mediocre rating. Another problem is that there's zero balance with the ideology. The European Americans are corrupt one way or another, and sometimes evil incarnate, while the Natives are generally painted as super-virtuous. But I have to give the movie credit for the first Old West sequence, which depicts the aftermath of a savage Indian raid. Then there's the "gay" Indian. Why sure!So the movie's a mixed bag. It's notable and unique enough to make it worth seeing, but its flaws mar its overall impact.The movie runs 147 minutes and was shot in Alberta, Montana and California.GRADE: C

JT-Kirk I can see why some folks won't like this film: it has a tone that is incredibly uneven, at different times diving deeply into very funny comedy and utterly tragic drama; it has an utterly unforgiving sense of violence and death; it doesn't pull any punches with the concept of the destruction of the Native Americans by the "white man"; and it's exceptionally long. If someone doesn't engage with the material on a strong level, they're going to feel every second dragging on them. Yet at two and a half hours, I found myself wanting a little more of the character's story, no matter how mundane or even more tragic it would become.Dustin Hoffman - even while donning heavy makeup, red-face, and a settler's accent - is incredibly engaging and mastering his craft with the zeal of a man knowing his own limits and stepping directly to them without hesitation. He embodies the comedy aspects with ease, yet never fully letting up of the layered nuance of the character within. And he's not alone, the majority of roles both big and small don't let the audience down, the director and the casting work on this film deliver a very complete story.The film's story is itself an interesting one, an aged man telling very personal tales of growing up on the frontier under incredibly challenging and varied circumstances, some of them historically famous. The character of Jack Crabb is a bit passive at times, observing the mania of the frontier from the perspective of both sides, having been born a white man but raised during puberty as a Cheyenne, then ping-ponging back and forth over and over between those worlds. Jack Crabb, also known as "Little Big Man", eventually comes to witness and suffer at the hands of George Custer, which becomes a greater and greater focus as the film shifts more of its focus from comedic to dramatic. Yet there's also a sense of letting go in this man's life, he has seen great and terrible things, he has had hope and hate, but he continues on. How he gets from the end of the story to his place at 121 years old is not told though, and that I would have liked to have seen at least a little of how he got from that life to the modern one, and what toll that took watching as the worlds he came from changed drastically around him. It might be easy to view Crabb's tale as a yarn spun by an old man wanting attention, there are elements lightly suggesting that possibility, yet Hoffman's acting tells a silent tale that maybe it's all real, and that right there is movie magic.Little Big Man isn't a movie that has only one character though, so throughout the story we meet characters once, twice, or many more times that all have their own story arcs, their own personalities -- some are for laughs, some are considerably more nuanced, and some are downright tragic. The film is rich with characters and consequences and flaws. Choosing to tell a story of the white man and the native man's interactions from a perspective that only very recently has become accepted is a strong choice and one that not every audience member can probably accept even today.The movie also sounds and looks great, shot on location in a wide format and filling each shot without overstuffing it. I'd like to say more, but the truth is that the production felt so right that it did its job perfectly - it told the story without being distracting. I also applaud the choice to have the Native American characters speak in their tongue but we hear English, this is after all a tale being told, not a cinematic attempt at an authentic recreation of Cheyenne life, otherwise half the film would be in another language and it just wouldn't have worked as well. This truly is a film of the '70s, having one foot in the cinematic movie-making of the past and the brutal honesty of that present.So while I think this movie was fantastic, I suppose I cannot recommend Little Big Man to everybody. It is a very good film and yet it will be a challenging film for some; it doesn't ask a lot of its audience but not every audience will be able to embrace the material. There are a lot of great performances including and beyond Dustin Hoffman, and production is rock solid, yet it doesn't quite fit in the world of comedy or drama, and Little Big Man runs too long for the impatient. But the rewards for those who find this film are significant.

Tad Pole . . . the true facts of the American West. It doesn't matter how fetching Faye Dunaway looks in her birthday suit, or whether tent dwellers beat the Mormons to polygamy and gay marriage, this is no excuse to rewrite the facts. A while back certain European countries started the Conservation, Ecology, and Green Movements we enjoy today. They also invented zoos and fire fighting techniques. You can imagine how shocked and saddened they were to hear Pocahantas say that thoughtless warrior relatives of hers had hunted the cuddly woolly mammoths of North America to Extinction, or how horrified they were to learn that descendants of these miscreants were currently decimating the vast hordes of bison and buffalo with intentionally-set prairie fires and human-instigated stampedes off cliffs. Therefore, Continental zoologists refined trans-oceanic sailing, so that they could come to America on HMS Beagle to save the wildlife (just as "Jake Sully" did on the Moon Pandora in AVATAR). LITTLE BIG MAN makes Wolverine hero George Armstrong Custer look like a total buffoon. If "Autie," as his buddies called him, really WAS such a Doofus, he would not have been able to win the Civil War and Free the Slaves. But Autie followed in the footsteps of Washington (defeating the Redcoats), Jackson (crushing the rabbits), and Santa Ana (taking down the Bowie\Crockett Slave Cartel) by Letting Freedom Ring at Gettyburg and Beyond. Though the Confederates were on the wrong side of History, at least they honored the Rules of War. Not so the Bison Killers. Assigned to safeguard Buffalo Bill's conservation efforts during America's Centennial Year (1876), Autie was waylaid, ambushed, and rubbed out by the same clan that had chowed down on the last woolly mammoth. Horrid mutilations followed. Michigan wept at the loss of her most humane native son. If you love Monty Python's Bible bashing, LITTLE BIG MAN's "achievement" in Snarky character assassination may appeal. But the scientific accuracy of the ICE AGE cartoon features looks like the last word from Wikipedia when contrasted with this travesty of a film!

weezeralfalfa Strange as it may seem, I was impressed with how similar the basic plot construction is to that of the well-regarded '41 film "Sullivan's Travels", which has nothing to do with Native Americans nor genocide. What they have in common is the main character(Jack, in the present case) plunged into an alien culture, then several times going back and forth between these cultures. For a time, they seem a lost soul, unsure of their identity as a member of one or the other culture. They also have the commonality of ironic coincidences as a recurring determinant of their drifting lives. There are, of course, some major differences in the character of the film. Clearly, the unexpected reappearance of numerous characters in Jack's life is a central theme of this film, which may well, as one reviewer suggested, symbolize the Native American's view of the universe as an endless series of recurring cycles.Some reviewers make the extravagant claim that this is the first film to clearly portray Plains 'Indians' as relatively desirable people, if not without some foibles. In contrast, their European conquerors were, on the whole, a crazy, greedy, arrogant, hypocritical bunch. But there were previous well known films that presented western 'Indians' as 'good guys', including the John Ford films: "Fort Apache" and, most relevantly, "Cheyenne Autumn",released 7 years earlier. The latter two dealt with conflict between the Cheyenne and US cavalry, in which the cavalry, along with most European settlers, were presented as 'the bad guys'. Of course, "Soldier Blue", also released in 1970, was another presumably Vietnam War-inspired take on the massacre of Cheyenne by US cavalry. In some respects, it more resembled "Cheyenne Autumn", while in other respects, it more resembled the present film. The '51 "Across the Wide Missouri" also presented an intimate portrait of Plains 'Indians'. Like Old Lodge Skins(OLS), Chief Bear Ghost in that film had had his fill of deaths from warfare, and was resigned to accept the fate of his people as eventual wards of a country governed by Europeans.One of the striking ironies is that OLS and Jack, who have suicidal thoughts at times later in the film, are the only ones spared in Custer's second annihilation of a Cheyenne village. OLS's belief that he can make himself invisible, in plain sight to the cavalry, appears to work. However, his later belief that magic can also make him die when he wants doesn't work. Both he, perhaps as a symbol of 'Indians' in general, and Jack will presumably live to see the Plains 'Indians' subdued, but not quite exterminated, forced onto reservations lacking their vital bison. Thus, OLS recognizes that the Indian's victory at Little Big Horn is their Pearl Harbor equivalent. Like the later Japanese, he knew that they were ultimately doomed in their struggle with the US military. Incidentally, I doubt it mere coincidence that Jack's Cheyenne name means Little Big Man, and that he is the only apparent survivor of the 7th cavalry massacre at Little Big Horn.I haven't seen any comments on a possible relationship between Younger Bear's seemingly irrelevant period of of being an obsessive contrary(doing the opposite of every normal thing), and Custer's later assumption that Jack, as his mistrusted scout, will advise him the opposite of what is favorable in relation to the 'Indians' at Little Big Horn. As a result, Custer is wildly overoptimistic in his assessment of his chances against the 'Indians'. But, instead of blaming himself for mistrusting Jack's information, he wants to shoot Jack. Custer, as well as Bill Hickok, can be interpreted as representing the bullying, overconfident, trigger-happy US military in the Vietnam War, as well as the 'Indian' wars.The presentation of European vs. Cheyenne women in Jack's life is perhaps the most unbalanced aspect of the film. The European women are all extreme types. His older sister Caroline is presented as rather mannish, the Cheyenne first assuming her to be a man, and not interested in having sex with her after discovering their mistake. Later, she reemerges in Jack's life as the leader of a vigilante group out to do justice to Jack and his quack medicine business partner. Later, she appears to attempt an incestuous relationship with Jack, before teaching him to be the best gunslinger in the West. But she can't change Jack's effeminate pacifist personality, thus eventually deserts him.Meanwhile, Jack comes under the influence of hypocritical, adulterous, nymphomaniac Louise, totally miscast as the wife of a bible-thumping 'Indian'-hating preacher, later to reappear to Jack as a widowed prostitute. Then, there is Olga, his rather stupid Scandinavian wife for a short while, before stolen by Cheyenne, to become the shrewish wife of Younger Bear. In contrast, his 4 Cheyenne widowed sister wives are presented as good women. Unfortunately, all were soon massacred, perhaps also symbolizing the infamous recent My Lai massacre in Vietnam.