Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Jack Crabb, looking back from extreme old age, tells of his life being raised by Indians and fighting with General Custer.
Little Big Man is a sprawling, revisionist Western epic that subverts genre conventions with sharp satirical wit and genuine emotional depth. Dustin Hoffman delivers a tour-de-force performance across decades of aging, while Chief Dan George is legendary as Old Lodge Skins. The narrative structure — a picaresque tall tale framing a damning critique of Manifest Destiny and the massacre of Native Americans — was genuinely radical for 1970. The cinematography is competent and occasionally striking but not consistently distinctive enough to earn a top mark. The ending, while thematically resonant, is somewhat meandering in its conclusion after the visceral Battle of Little Bighorn sequence. Novelty is high: few Westerns before or since have combined dark comedy, deep sympathy for Native Americans, and episodic picaresque storytelling with such singular vision.