Little Big Man

1970 Directed by Arthur Penn

Either the most neglected hero in history or a liar of insane proportion!

Jack Crabb, looking back from extreme old age, tells of his life being raised by Indians and fighting with General Custer.

Dustin Hoffman Faye Dunaway Chief Dan George Martin Balsam Richard Mulligan Jeff Corey Aimée Eccles 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 Steve Miranda Ken Mayer

Alternative Titles

Piccolo grande uomo, En god dag at dø, O Pequeno Grande Homem, 小人物, 小大人, Το Μεγάλο Ανθρωπάκι, 작은 거인, Малкият голям човек

adventure western drama comedy

139 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★½ 1

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 attentions via ostentatious coughing fits from adjacent beds; etc. And while the film boldly identifies with the Native Americans, depicting U.S. soldiers as villains, those good intentions are hamstrung by the subtitle-averse era in which it was made, which forces…
Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★½

Director and producer Arthur Penn's perpetually connected to the American New Wave due to helming Bonnie and Clyde despite having a filmography which stretches back to the fifties with his western The Left-Handed Gun, which saw Paul Newman portraying Billy the Kid, and here he creates an unusual story with this adaptation of Thomas Berger’s 1964 novel which accounts protagonist Jack Crabb narrating his life story while in hospice care at the age of 121 to an interested historian.
It's a sprawling story which has been superbly adapted by Calder Willingham and employs facets of parody and adversity to familiar tropes of the Old West to procure destruction to multiple numbers of prominent misconceptions. From start to finish it communicates bitingly…
Review by Naughty aka Juli Norwood ★★★★★

A western I could really sink my teeth into! One of my favorite Dustin Hoffman films! And Chief Dan George was absolutely brilliant in this film! I was just doing some research on the film apparently the role played by Chief Dan George was originally offered to Marlon Brando and he turned it down! I believe the film was much better off with Chief Dan George! He is the epitome of what it meant to be a human being!
I also appreciated the fact that a large majority of the cast is American Indian!
Review by Oliver Swift ★★★★½ 1

120 year old Dustin Hoffman looks like my left nut
Review by Ben Hibburd ★★★

"Little Big Man" is a mixed bag of a film. Dustin Hoffman is Jack Crabb a 120 year old "Walter Mitty" type of figure. The film opens with Crabb recounting significant moments of his life from being raised by Native Americans to befriending Wild Bill Hickok to fighting General Custer. "Little Big Man" is a humorous, satirical take on the Western mythos.
Overall Arthur Penn does a wonderful job helming this film, there are some hilarious comedic transitions and the scale of the film is impressive to say the least. However, like most comedic films there are peaks and valleys. A couple of segments drag on to long and often times the tone of the film gets mixed up in…
Review by chavel ★★★★★ 2

“The Human Beings, my son, they believe everything is alive. Not only man and animals. But also water, earth, stone.” – Old Lodge Skins
Arthur Penn’s western masterpiece that would never get made today, which makes it all the more unique and idiosyncratic. Little Big Man is about 121-year old Jack Crabb, a white man who goes back and forth living between white culture and the Cheyenne Indians throughout the course of his life. Dustin Hoffman does a peerless and expressive job playing the young puerile Indian, then young white man, then rugged adventurer whose self-appointed mission is to defeat General Custer (Richard Mulligan). I have often described to others this film as a comic romp version of “Dances with…
Review by Steve G 🐝 ★★★★½

Disillusionment In Sun-Drenched 1970s American New Wave Cinema: A Watching Brief
I think this is a rare occasion where the term 'revisionist western' is actually a bit of a misnomer.
In the traditional usage of the phrase, yes, I suppose Little Big Man fits the bill. But I suppose if you were to take the phrase literally, you could argue that it's not revisionist at all. It's telling the outright truth. The US Cavalry were murderous villains and the Native American nations they fought against were in the right.
It's only revisionist because the vast majority of other westerns made on this subject were putting forward outright lies. *They* were the revisionist ones. I just wonder how comfortably Little Big…
Review by waiyanaung ★★★★

I am suprised that when it comes to portrayal of natives in westerns people don't mention this much. This depicted the Indians as sincere human beings with mutiple layers and complex feelings (there is even a homosexual indian in this) and it felt so good to watch that. The movie itself is so great, it felt like two different movies put together but somehow this works much better than it has the right to.
Little Big Man is a story of Jack Crabb, who parents got killed by Pawnee at the age of 10 then he was rescued and raised by a band of Cheyenne as one of their own. One day when he was in battle, the white soliders…
Review by dankwit 2

really got into this when I realized that it was the western Forrest Gump
Review by Björn Broekman ★★★ 2

It was fun.
The action sequences were well made.
Dustin Hoffman is good in it, as well as most of the other actors.
I was entertained throughout, but I can't say I loved it.
Not bad if you don't have anything else to do.
Not my best review, I agree, but I'm pretty tired. Maybe more about it tomorrow, although I'm not sure yet if I'll have much more to say about it. . .
Review by ~findlay🔮🔪 ★★★★★

"There is an endless supply of white men, but there has always been a limited number of human beings"
the full extension of a life lived and recollections and memories poured over throughout that life. sometime memories end up re-shaped by the winds of time as a lie, but that lie compounds as part of our identity, making the truth something precious, left to die on a field, or in the last touch of a first love, or the smile of an old friend, or the best Cola you ever drank.
the full spectrum of fledgling America's modern existence and as human a tale as any. Funny exchanges, loves, fights, heartbreaks, agonies, bloodshed, friends, enemies, death and war. As perpetual…
Review by Xavier Bolvan ★★★½

Дастин Хоффман с его внешностью и ростом в кино мог быть героем в негероической профессии (журналист, учёный) либо состоять при герое. В "Соломенных псах" оружие в руках подобного человека окажется крайней мерой, в "Маленьком большом человеке" поначалу становится частью комичного путешествия по жанру вестерна: карьера стрелка начинается с обучения специальному прищуру (иствудовскому?), а дальше едущий в дилижансе герой переживёт нападение индейцев и станет "искателем" похищенной супруги. Конечно, режиссёр вновь переплетает смешное с драматическим, как в "Бонни и Клайде", и нехарактерный для вестернов персонаж местами как будто пародирует именно импотента Бэрроу - Джек Крэбб оказывается куда более умелым стрелком во всех смыслах, ублажающим трёх девчонок подряд. К тому же сыгранный Хоффманом воспитанник индейцев возвращается к белым людям в 16-летнем возрасте, из-за…

Recent reviews

Review by nedwolp ½

big big mess
Review by Katey 𓆏 ★★★½

I fucking love Little Horse they are so good 🥺🥺🥺
Review by Louis Matta ★★

The anthology nature of the plot is tedious, especially when there’s little sense of what makes Hoffman’s character so integral to focus on, saying less and less about his persona or backstory, as his appearance & behavior shift with each “period” of his life.
The parts don’t add up to enough of a whole, having various chapters that stray from the story’s central (underwhelming) themes, getting lost in farcical western humor that lacks a punch. It feels like a rougher, tonally uneven, less PC version of “Forrest Gump.”
Review by ancient_signals ★★

I remember watching this in high school when I was just getting into older movies and I revisited with my dad when I was home for Christmas. It didn’t capture me as I remembered. The tone shifts are really bizarre and the moments that feel like reaching towards a Blazing Saddles style goofy don’t hit like they want them too. Dustin Hoffman’s voice is so annoying.
Review by Ezequiel Silva ★★

Até gosto da proposta de resgatar o cinema faroeste sob um olhar crítico da época, muito por causa do que o filme apresenta quando preocupa-se em mostrar os diferentes caminhos percorridos pelo protagonista. Nesta primeira parte de “Pequeno Grande Homem”, impera mais o revisionismo do gênero enquanto cinema, do que enquanto período histórico. Há o mínimo de boa performatividade, sobretudo com o corpo do Dustin Hoffman. Depois, quando o longa-metragem começa a levar a sério demais, sinto que as coisas desandam de maneira destoante – sem o gracejo inicial.
Review by keelyhood ★★½

admirable creativity gets lost in the disorientation. i love little big man in concept... on screen, not so much. making this was a risky endeavor, arguably too ahead of its time for its own good. this seems like an attempt at a the secret life of walter mitty (1947) esque film, which is successfully replicated well in later years’ big fish (2003) and forrest gump (1994), but not here. there are times when the writing is cohesive enough to see the potential of this absurdism satire life story. unfortunately, the surrounding disconnect of little big man overwhelms its virtues. the tone is wildly inconsistent, the humor falls flat, and most everything is scattered beyond redemption. it’s worth mentioning that dustin hoffman acts his heart out per usual.
Review by Xavier Bolvan ★★★½

Дастин Хоффман с его внешностью и ростом в кино мог быть героем в негероической профессии (журналист, учёный) либо состоять при герое. В "Соломенных псах" оружие в руках подобного человека окажется крайней мерой, в "Маленьком большом человеке" поначалу становится частью комичного путешествия по жанру вестерна: карьера стрелка начинается с обучения специальному прищуру (иствудовскому?), а дальше едущий в дилижансе герой переживёт нападение индейцев и станет "искателем" похищенной супруги. Конечно, режиссёр вновь переплетает смешное с драматическим, как в "Бонни и Клайде", и нехарактерный для вестернов персонаж местами как будто пародирует именно импотента Бэрроу - Джек Крэбб оказывается куда более умелым стрелком во всех смыслах, ублажающим трёх девчонок подряд. К тому же сыгранный Хоффманом воспитанник индейцев возвращается к белым людям в 16-летнем возрасте, из-за…
Review by Oliver Swift ★★★★½ 1

120 year old Dustin Hoffman looks like my left nut
Review by Ianception ★★★★½

Really got invested with this once I became accustomed to the story and tone, as both are a little bizarre. The story is sort of like Forrest Gump in the Wild West with how the main character’s life intertwines with various genre tropes and famous figures of the era. There is a heavy reflection on American history with satire often used to deconstruct the myths that surround our past. Little Big Man himself can be accused of unreliable narration as his honesty is both attacked and defended at certain points. Perhaps this is meant as a clue for the audience to question their own preconceived notions about history and ask if they’ve been lied to before.
Also, I want to see Clint Eastwood and Dustin Hoffman have a squint-off.
Review by Jeremie Richard ★★★

A "Forrest Gump" set in the old west, "Little Big Man" is the epic saga of a young man raised by the Cheyenne who crosses paths with some of the west's greatest legends while never quite achieving that same level of notoriety himself. Dustin Hoffman steps into the eponymous lead role and the film takes us through his life as a young boy in 1859 up to his involvement in Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, encountering such legends as General George Armstrong Custer and Wild Bill Hickok along the way. Based on the novel of the same name by Thomas Berger, Little Big Man is essentially a satirical exploration of the myths and legends of the old west…
Review by Oliver Fenwick XII ★★★★½

The prequel to Forrest Gump
Review by Simon Andersson ★★

Ofta nästan parodiskt märklig dialog och story. Är dock 70-talets Hollywood och Dustin Hoffman, så minst 2/5 garanterat sedan innan. Mer blev det däremot inte.