Little Big Man

Jack Crabb, aged a hundred and twenty-one, sits in a care home telling his life to a historian with a tape recorder. Orphaned as a boy, he was raised by the Cheyenne, went back to the whites, then returned again. He worked for a quack salesman, was a gunfighter, a drunk, a scout for Custer, and was at Little Bighorn. How much of it is true is not established. Arthur Penn directed. The source is Thomas Berger's 1964 novel. Dustin Hoffman plays Crabb, Chief Dan George plays Old Lodge Skins, the Cheyenne elder who raised him, and Faye Dunaway plays Mrs Pendrake. Dick Smith created the old-age makeup, built from foam latex and including something not done before: false eyelids that could blink with the actor. Because of the editing not a single blink survives in the finished film, to Smith's annoyance. To find the voice of a hundred-and-twenty-one-year-old, Hoffman sat in his dressing room and screamed at the top of his lungs for an hour. Chief Dan George was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and won the National Society of Film Critics and New York Film Critics Circle awards. It is a revisionist western: the Native characters are people and the United States Cavalry are the killers. It was deliberately built as an anti-war film while Vietnam was going on, and that is largely why the tone lurches, moving from comedy to massacre and back. Who it is for: viewers who like westerns that invert the genre, and Dustin Hoffman. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a consistent tone. The film tries to make you laugh and shake you inside the same half hour and does not always land it.