Movie · 1970 · Western, Comedy, Adventure, Drama · 2h 19m · PG · English
Curator score: 6.0/10 (63.4K ratings)
Either the most neglected hero in history or a liar of insane proportion!
Overview
Jack Crabb, looking back from extreme old age, tells of his life being raised by Indians and fighting with General Custer.
Ratings
Curator score: 6.0/10
IMDb: 7.5/10
Letterboxd: 3.69/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 91%
Metacritic: 63
TMDB: 7.5/10
Director
Arthur Penn
Production
Cinema Center Films, Stockbridge-Hiller Productions
Cast
Dustin Hoffman, Faye Dunaway, Chief Dan George, Martin Balsam, Richard Mulligan, Jeff Corey, Aimée Eccles, Kelly Jean Peters, William Hickey, Alan Oppenheimer, Lou Cutell, M. Emmet Walsh, James Anderson, Jesse Vint, Thayer David, Philip Kenneally, Jack Bannon, Ray Dimas, Alan Howard, Jack Mullaney
Where to watch
fuboTV, MGM Plus, Philo
Curator Review
Verdict
A sharp, sprawling revisionist western that mixes satire, tragedy, and frontier myth-busting with real personality. Its tonal whiplash can be divisive, but the ambition, episodic structure, and Dustin Hoffman’s performance make it a distinctive watch.
Best for
revisionist western fans
viewers who like anti-myth American history stories
people open to tonal shifts between comedy and drama
fans of picaresque, life-spanning narratives
Skip if
you want a straightforward western
you dislike abrupt changes in tone
you prefer comedy to stay consistently funny
you’re sensitive to dated racial and gender attitudes in older films
Overview
Little Big Man is one of the more unruly and memorable westerns of its era. Framed as a near-mythic recollection from a man at the end of his life, it moves through frontier legend, military folly, and cultural collision with a restless, episodic energy that feels closer to a tall tale than a conventional epic.
Worth noting
Arthur Penn uses that structure to puncture the romance of the Old West. The movie can be funny, bitter, elegiac, and absurd in the same stretch, sometimes by design and sometimes because it simply refuses to settle into one mode. That instability is part of its appeal, even when the jokes or tonal pivots don’t fully land.
Bottom line
What stays with you is the film’s sense of scale and contradiction: a comic anti-hero drifting through history, a revisionist view of Custer and frontier violence, and a performance from Hoffman that commits fully to the film’s strange, elastic identity. It’s messy, but it’s a fascinating kind of mess.
Top Letterboxd reviews
Matt! (3★) · 252 likes
This movie feels more like an anthology than it does an epic. Little Big Man is a life-spanning adventure film following and narrated by Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman), a white man who was once adopted by Native Americans, then rejoined the white folk, then was re-ingratiated into the Native Americans, then went back to the white Americans, then back again and on and on during the Civil War era. The story is split into several distinctive periods of Jack’s life,… more This movie feels more like an anthology than it does an epic. Little Big Man is a life-spanning adventure film following and narrated by Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman), a white man who was once adopted by Native Americans, then rejoined the white folk, then was re-ingratiated into the Native Americans, then went back to the white Americans, then back again and on and on during the Civil War era. The story is split into several distinctive periods of Jack’s life,… more
dankwit · 248 likes
really got into this when I realized that it was the western Forrest Gump
theriverjordan (3.5★) · 161 likes
“Little Big Man” is an epic Western odyssey with just about the weirdest energy of any film I’ve ever seen.
“Man” opens with credits over of the charred corpses of frontier pioneers... pauses for about two minutes for that tragedy to sink in — then pivots to d*ck jokes and Dustin Hoffman getting drunk off root beer.
I can’t say I enjoyed the movie, but I respect director Arthur Penn’s hustle to achieve absolute tonal chaos.
I also firmly salute… more
Oliver Swift (4.5★) · 159 likes
120 year old Dustin Hoffman looks like my left nut
Mike D'Angelo (2.5★) · 121 likes
42/100
[Originally written on my blog.]
Doesn't work for me as comedy or as pointed satire, and watching it now I feel like a contemporary remake would probably star Adam Sandler (with Will Ferrell as Custer). Jokes are mostly predicated on feeble reversals of expectation concerning propriety: Crabb's sister plainly yearns to be raped by Indians even as she feigns terror; Dunaway's proper lady all but molests him while prattling about righteousness and purity; his wife's widowed sisters demand his… more
A revenge western that mixes frontier brutality with dry humor and a wandering structure.
Topics
revisionist western, satire, picaresque, frontier myth, American Civil War era, cultural conflict, dark comedy, epic storytelling, anti-hero, historical drama