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Staring:
Dustin Hoffman,
Faye Dunaway,
Chief Dan George,
Martin Balsam,
Richard Mulligan
Director:
Arthur Penn
Average Customer Rating:     
List Price: $14.98
Our Price: $6.99
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Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested) Binding: DVD Brand: Paramount EAN: 0097363772149 Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC Label: Paramount Manufacturer: Paramount Number Of Discs: 1 Number Of Items: 1 Publisher: Paramount Region Code: 1 Release Date: 2003-04-29 Running Time: 139 Studio: Paramount Theatrical Release Date: 1970 |
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Product Description One hundred year-old white man recounts how he was raised by Native Americans, became a gunslinger, and survived the battle at Little Big Horn.
Amazon.com Jack Crabb is the only white survivor of the Battle of Little Big Horn and the centenarian shares his story in this picaresque fable of the Old West. In Arthur Penn's adaptation of Thomas Berger's novel, Dustin Hoffman plays Jack from teen years into old age in a bravura performance. And Jack's story is a fantastic one: captured by Indians as a boy, reared as an Indian, shuttling back and forth between the white and Indian worlds. In the process, he befriends everyone from Wild Bill Hickock to George Armstrong Custer and is a gunslinger, a snake-oil salesman, and an Army scout. This is a solid blend of comedy and tragedy, with a strong statement to make about America's treatment of Native Americans without sermonizing. A terrific cast includes Faye Dunaway, Martin Balsam, and Richard Mulligan. But this show is all Hoffman's. --Marshall Fine
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    Great old flick, 2010-04-29 Great old flick just to wile away the time with your favorite drink and popcorn. Sly comments on how we really won the west and on society in general. And, do those actors look young! Maybe just a touch long, but still fun.
    A classic, 2010-08-20 One of the industries early and better efforts at utilizing actual Native Americans to portray themselves rather than some painted up suyapies.
    A classic film for everyone to enjoy!, 2010-08-27 Best movie i have bought in a while. I would recommend this movie to anyone, because it has a little bit of everything for everyone. A must have in a DVD buff's collection.
    Great movie!, 2010-02-19 My wife likes Dustin Hoffman, but had never heard of Little Big Man, so I purchased it for her. We both loved it. Nice price and prompt delivery.
    Classic tragic comedy, 2010-03-04 I saw this film again after a hiatus of 25 years recently, and it held up very well. No doubt the fans of the Berger book hated it, but as a movie it comes off very well. It stands as one of the great absurdist movies in the contrasts it draws between the white man and the Indians. And the Indians aren't all good--the Paiutes are portrayed as bad Indians--as bad as the whites. But the strength of the movie is in its hilarious and often tragic comparisons between the two cultures, and we see the absurdity and complexity of the white man's ways thrown into relief by comparison with the simplicity of the Indian ways. The dialog is sometimes totally demented and resembles nothing so much as the European theater of the absurd transplanted to the American west. In one of the greatest ironic/satirical movie roles of all time, Chief Dan George delivers many of these lines, such as when he comments on one of his wives (I think I have it more or less correct, but cut me some slack): "Snake woman cooks dog well, and has very soft skin. But the problem with snake women is that they copulate with horses. She denies it, of course, but she is lying. This is why I call her, "woman who does not like horses"." LOL. Some day I'm going to have to read the book just to see if it was toned down for the movie.
The all-star cast all turn in great performances and Hoffman turns in possibly the best performance of his career, and certainly the most wide ranging one in going from a teenager to a 120-year old man during the course of the movie. The other stars were also great and there's not a false note among them. Martin Balsam doesn't always get as much credit as he should having spent his entire career in character-actor roles, but here he is superb as the eternally optimistic snake oil salesman who is continually losing body parts, eventually becoming peg-legged, one-handed, and one-eyed. Faye Dunaway plays a seductive and naughty preacher's wife and she's the perfect choice for this role. Also notable were Jeff Corey as Wild Bill Hickok and Richard Mulligan as the ambitious but narcissistic General Custer. By the way, just a little trivia here, Custer graduated at the bottom of his West Point class, but still made general at a very young age. One thing you could say about the Old West was that there were certainly opportunities for quick advancement that don't exist today. :-)
Overall a great movie that has stood the test of time.
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