This buried treasure is worth the viewing even with your fancy 21st century movie perspective. Why? Because it a fun romp that entertains more than you'd think it would. After all, movie-making styles change with the times--but you can never short-change a good action/heist flick that has a dynamite plot! It's not a comedy, but you can just know that Gould, Plummer and York enjoyed making this one!. Look for a young John Candy too.
Recounting how the West was won through the eyes of a white man raised as a Native American, Arthur Penn's 1970 adaptation of Thomas Berger's satirical novel was a comic yet stinging allegory about the bloody results of American imperialism. As a misguided 20th-century historian listens, 121-year-old Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman) narrates the story of being the only white survivor of Custer's Last Stand. White orphan Crabb was adopted by the Cheyenne, renamed "Little Big Man," and raised in the ways of the "Human Beings" by paternal mentor Old Lodge Skins (Chief Dan George), accepting non-conformity and living peacefully with nature. Violently thrust into the white world, Jack meets a righteous preacher (Thayer David) and his wife (Faye Dunaway), tries to be a gunfighter under the tutelage of Wild Bill Hickock (Jeff Corey), and gets married. Returned to the Cheyenne by chance, Jack prefers life as a Human Being. The carnage wreaked by the white man in the Washita massacre and the lethal fallout from the egomania of General George A. Custer (Richard Mulligan) at Little Big Horn, however, show Crabb the horrific implications of Old Lodge Skins' sage observation, "There is an endless supply of White Men, but there has always been a limited number of Human Beings."
Timeless is timeless, and this film is worth watching again and again.
Stage, live TV, and movie director, Arthur Penn (who gave Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway film-icon staus with his 1967 "Bonnie & Clyde") has enormous fun--and simultaneously delivers a meaningful message--as Dustin Hoffman gives us an endearing portrait of the "Little Big Man", the only white survivor of Custer's "Last Stand." We're talking about an absolutely wonderful piece of entertainment here--with outstanding production values and memorable performances by Hoffman, Faye Dunaway, good ol' Jeff Corey, brilliant Richard Mulligan and Native American treasure, Chief Dan George. This is, truly, a one-of-a-kind movie for all ages.