Jack Crabb is 121 years old. His eyes are agate chips; senility seeps through the cracks in his voice. But Crabb is not your average superannuated former Indian fighter, former Indian, intimate of Wild Bill Hickok and General George Armstrong Custer, ex-gunslinger, scalawag and drunkard. No sir. He is Little Big Man, sole survivor of the Battle of Little Bighorn. He may tell a stretcher or two, but when he reminisces, graduate students listen. A budding anthropologist starts a tape recorder, Crabb opens his toothless yawp and the saga unfurls.
And unfurls. And unfurls. For 21 hours Little Big Man turns the tableaux on nearly every aspect of Western man. Thomas Berger's panoramic novel owed its salinity to an immediate relative, Huckleberry Finn, from which it ransacked idiom and hyperbole by the chapterful. Like Huck, young Jack had no social insight; he accepted violence and duplicity the way he regarded sleet and fire−as aspects of earthly life. The film happily preserves the chronicle's innocence, if not its exact text.
Crabb knows Americana as he knows an old penny; from the Indian side and the In God We Trust side. He first appears as a boy whose family has been massacred by redskins. The Cheyennes who carry him off seem a mere mob to begin with, but they soon separate into individuals who refer to one another (in English translation) as "Human Beings." The boy becomes an adopted brave, Little Big Man.
In the title role, shuttling incessantly from the red to the white side, Dustin Hoffman adopts precisely the right attitude of bewildered reality lost in myth, a photograph projected on a Frederic Remington painting. Unhappily, not all the cast is as comfortable in their roles. Some of the whites, such as Faye Dunaway as a preacher's oestrous wife, and Martin Balsam as a bunco artist, play like fugitives from a road company of The Drunkard, with galvanic gestures and frozen speech patterns. The Human Beings, by contrast, are a people of dignity and variety. Among them are the homosexual Little Horse; the contrary Younger Bear, who says "hello" for "goodbye" and bathes in dirt instead of water; and the true lodestar of the film, Old Lodge Skins (played by Chief Dan George).