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.

Dustin Hoffman with Little Big Man joined the ranks of such players as Jeanette MacDonald, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, Barbara Stanwyck and Edward Judd. What he had in common with them is that he played a man greatly aged with make up reminiscing about his youth which was quite a colorful one. Later on Cicely Tyson and Emilio Estevez joined this select bunch.Poor Hoffman just can't find himself a niche in the world of the west either with white men or with Indians. He finds himself in the Dakota Territory of the 1870s and makes the acquaintance of such people as Wild Bill Hickok and George Armstrong Custer, a couple of old west legends who met famous premature deaths in the same year of 1876. And of course some lesser people in mostly low places.Hoffman gets some great support from people like Martin Balsam as a medicine show conman whom he spends some time with and Faye Dunaway as the widow woman who takes the orphan Hoffman in and explains and demonstrates the facts of life. Jeff Corey plays Wild Bill Hickok who explains to Hoffman he really doesn't have the right stuff to be a gunfighter.Best of all is Richard Mulligan as the controversial General George Armstrong Custer whose ambitions for military glory led to the massacre at Little Big Horn. Mulligan is ambitious and will not take good advice. Watching Little Big Man in the scenes with Mulligan it was like looking at Donald Trump campaigning for president. Just like The Donald, Mulligan will not listen to anyone other than himself. In fact you mostly have to use reverse psychology to get Mulligan to do things your way. Hoffman may be a misfit, not unlike his character in The Graduate, but he learns to play Mulligan like a piccolo.Little Big Man is a different and entertaining look at the old west and Hoffman is superb. But the one to really watch in this is Richard Mulligan. He steals the film in whatever scene he's in.

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.

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.