Books, Arts & Manners: Hoffman, Jagger and That’s It

Dustin Hoffman deserves the Oscar for a performance which merits the hackneyed accolade tour de force, in a movie that can fairly be called brilliant, Little Big Man. I’m not going to worry about the historical accuracy of the film, or whether Professor Greenway would like it. That seems entirely beside the point. Derived from Thomas Berger’s novel, Little Big Man is in the Hollywood “big film” tradition without the phony Hollywood that’s driven young people and adult movie lovers into the little art houses to worship the newest Truffaut. Hoffman as Jack Crabb, 121-year-old survivor of the battle of Little Big Horn, and as Crabb in his teens, young manhood and early middle age, demonstrates what superlative acting is all about. The film is comedy, tragedy, sociopolitical statement, adventure yarn, directed by Arthur Penn with consummate mastery of almost every element. It restores one’s faith in the American film as have few others in recent years.

Hoffman is constantly believable in Little Big Man, a necessary quality in those episodes which are tail-tale verging on fantasy. He’s supported by Chief Dan George as Crabb’s Cheyenne “grandfather,” an actor and role so dignified, manifesting such integrity of person and part, that I again regretted never knowing my grandfathers. Martin Balsam is delightful as a patent-medicine charlatan; Faye Dunaway, who acts only in bold-face, is surprisingly good as a minister’s wife turned whore; and the others—Indian maidens, twitchy braves, prissy soldiers, Western gunslingers, egomaniacal General Custer—are uniformly right. But it is Hoffman, wending his way from orphaned youth to adopted Cheyenne to Christianized white boy to Indian and on to Custer’s Last Stand, who makes the movie sing. Little Big Man embodies and scorns the old myths of the West, ironically, sometimes parodically, playing the cliches (noble savage, savage redskin, civilized white, brutal racist, and so on) against each other with devastating wit and compelling force. We’ll hear a lot about Little Big Man as a True Tale of “genocide,” and director Penn will be glad that we do. But that’s not it at all. Little Big Man, the finest American film of 1970, is an ambivalent allegory, not a morality play.

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David Brudnoy

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Dustin Hoffman deserves the Oscar for a performance which merits the hackneyed accolade tour de force, in a movie that can fairly be called brilliant, Little Big Man. I’m not going to worry about the historical accuracy of the film, or whether Professor Greenway would like it. That seems entirely beside the point. Derived from Thomas Berger’s novel, Little Big Man is in the Hollywood “big film” tradition without the phony Hollywood that’s driven young people and adult movie lovers into the little art houses to worship the newest Truffaut. Hoffman as Jack Crabb, 121-year-old survivor of the battle of Little Big Horn, and as Crabb in his teens, young manhood and early middle age, demonstrates what superlative acting is all about. The film is comedy, tragedy, sociopolitical statement, adventure yarn, directed by Arthur Penn with consummate mastery of almost every element. It restores one’s faith in the American film as have few others in recent years.

Hoffman is constantly believable in Little Big Man, a necessary quality in those episodes which are tail-tale verging on fantasy. He’s supported by Chief Dan George as Crabb’s Cheyenne “grandfather,” an actor and role so dignified, manifesting such integrity of person and part, that I again regretted never knowing my grandfathers. Martin Balsam is delightful as a patent-medicine charlatan; Faye Dunaway, who acts only in bold-face, is surprisingly good as a minister’s wife turned whore; and the others—Indian maidens, twitchy braves, prissy soldiers, Western gunslingers, egomaniacal General Custer—are uniformly right. But it is Hoffman, wending his way from orphaned youth to adopted Cheyenne to Christianized white boy to Indian and on to Custer’s Last Stand, who makes the movie sing. Little Big Man embodies and scorns the old myths of the West, ironically, sometimes parodically, playing the cliches (noble savage, savage redskin, civilized white, brutal racist, and so on) against each other with devastating wit and compelling force. We’ll hear a lot about Little Big Man as a True Tale of “genocide,” and director Penn will be glad that we do. But that’s not it at all. Little Big Man, the finest American film of 1970, is an ambivalent allegory, not a morality play.