Little Big Man (1970)

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Go in cold, and you're likely to emerge with your blood boiling. This has to be seen to be believed.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

Arthur Penn had a great run of films starting with "Bonnie and Clyde" and (arguably) ending with "Night Moves" that all seem to deal with the abject failure of the American ideal and it's institutions. Dustin Hoffman stars as the oldest survivor of the Battle of Little Big Horn (in incredible old age make up by Dick Smith) who tells William Hickey his life story. Hoffman is adopted by the Cheyenne and raised as one of them after his family is killed in an attack by the Pawnee. He eventually rejoins white society and has a series of adventures mostly highlighted by the meanness and hypocrisy of everyone he meets. This culminates in him witnessing the (deserved) massacre of Custer's troops at Little Big Horn. This isn't Penn's best film, but it's one of the best films of it's era that uses the conventions of the Western to comment on the unrest in current society, especially about the war in Vietnam. It has a magnificent supporting cast highlighted by Richard Mulligan's bravura portrayal of Custer as an egomaniac.

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

My tastes have changed over the years. The last time I saw this was the edited-for-TV version and now recently, uncut on TCM. I liked it before; I didn't like it this time. It's like watching M*A*S*H in that it lulls you into thinking it's a comedy and then it gets very bloody and graphic. Gunfighter battles and Indian massacres. At least one part of the story is true: Custer did wipe out 210 innocent "Human Beings" (as the tribe calls itself) for almost no reason at all. However, most of the colorful parts of the movie seem to be tall tales. (Example: he makes love to 4 Indian squaws at once.) It reminds me of Cecil B. DeMille's "The Plainsman" in that the storyline is illogical. He meets up with the same colorful characters over and over again: Mr. Merriweather (Martin Balsam). Mrs. Pendrake (Faye Dunaway), who becomes a whore. "Olga", his fiery red-haired ungrateful wife, who becomes an Indian squaw for his "sworn enemy" Indian brother. Wild Bill Hickok, who dies unexpectedly. Chief Dan George, as "Grandfather", was nominated for an Oscar and deserved it. At the end an outstanding "dazed and confused" portrayal by Richard Mulligan as an egotistical and crazy General Custer. (Was the real Custer really that stupid?) Too long and too contrived for me. Dustin Hoffman's acting is very uneven. It's brilliant at times yet unpolished and unfunny.

Everyone i've talked to about this film has said to me, "Oh, it's just like the book". No, it is not! True, the gist of many of the scenes in the film resemble scenes in the novel, but only in the most rudimentary way. As cinematic as the book seems, it actually presents a major problem to any adaptor who wants to do anything like justice to it in a screen adaptation: I would say over two-thirds of the entire book is narration, and most of its scenes, as cinematic as they may seem, are embedded in this narration, and while there is also a great deal of dialogue, these scenes are tempered by passages where key things that happen are rendered in print only through vague description in the narration, of the "Oh, and then this happened" sort - meaning that anyone who wanted to turn this book into a movie where there is any kind of successful narrative flow that does justice to the book's sustained vision and creativity would have to do a LOT of creative work filling in these gaps, turning Berger's intermittent vagueness into specific screen action that matches in tone the dialogue and action Berger has already supplied. It's the kind of problem one can only envision being solved satisfactorily by bringing in the author himself to do the adaptation. In this respect, the filmmakers have failed utterly - there is not one second of this film that is anywhere near as inspired or witty as anything in the book. As craftsmanship, the film is mediocre; the film looks like it was shot on a soundstage, and gives the viewer no feeling for nature or the absurd, crazy poetry of American Indian life that is so much a part of what makes the book so successful; Berger's superbly sophisticated and imaginative moral absurdism has been turned into crude, ugly, cheap, cartoonish left-wing caricature that resembles the work of Oliver Stone; and, aside from the one glorious exception of Chief Dan George, in his wonderful turn as Old Lodge Skins, the performances are gross, sloppy and impersonal, with Dustin Hoffman terribly miscast, his innocent, square, adenoidal man-child persona subtly but completely wrong for the sketchiness and semi-amoral pragmatism of Jack Crabb, a man who drifts between two opposed lifestyles, American and Indian, forming no loyalty with either – a character which would require a projection, not of guilt or corruption, but of simple adult knowledge, something Hoffman is incapable of.