Best movie ever!

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

121 year old Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman) recounts his life in the old west. He claims to be the sole white survivor of Little Bighorn. He and his older sister Caroline are the sole survivors of Pawnee. They are taken in by the Cheyenne. Caroline escapes but Jack is adopted. He is captured by US troopers, apprentice with a snake-oil salesman, becomes a gunslinger after reuniting with Caroline, meets Wild Bill Hickok, marries and bankrupted store, follows Custer, reunite with the Cheyenne and then tricks Custer into Little Bighorn.This is part tall-tales, part satire, part historical reimagining and more accurate than most old western. It is smart and funny. It takes sharp jabs at the old image of Indians. Dustin Hoffman is brilliant in this new world western epic. It does take random turns which is part of its charm.

I remember very well Little big man being shot here in July 1969.Hoffman rented a house from a prominent local doctor.Went out one evening to where they were shooting and got a first hand look at why these Big Budget Movies cost so much to shoot,One scene that's in the movie that lasts about 8 seconds took over 4 hrs to get right.Veteran Stuntman Loren Janes and J,N.Roberts came over to our Motorcycle Dealership one evening and showed behind the scenes footage of Jane's stuntwork on movies like "How the west was Won" and Nevada Smith. He stunt doubled for Steve McQueen in almost all his Films.Movie was good but I thought it was too long needed some cutting.One local resident here that was a wagon driver had numerous scenes and thought he was going to have a good amount of screen time. Every scene he was in ended up on the cutting room floor. He was pretty devastated to say the least..s.m.

My tastes have changed over the years. The last time I saw this was the edited-for-TV version and now recently, uncut on TCM. I liked it before; I didn't like it this time. It's like watching M*A*S*H in that it lulls you into thinking it's a comedy and then it gets very bloody and graphic. Gunfighter battles and Indian massacres. At least one part of the story is true: Custer did wipe out 210 innocent "Human Beings" (as the tribe calls itself) for almost no reason at all. However, most of the colorful parts of the movie seem to be tall tales. (Example: he makes love to 4 Indian squaws at once.) It reminds me of Cecil B. DeMille's "The Plainsman" in that the storyline is illogical. He meets up with the same colorful characters over and over again: Mr. Merriweather (Martin Balsam). Mrs. Pendrake (Faye Dunaway), who becomes a whore. "Olga", his fiery red-haired ungrateful wife, who becomes an Indian squaw for his "sworn enemy" Indian brother. Wild Bill Hickok, who dies unexpectedly. Chief Dan George, as "Grandfather", was nominated for an Oscar and deserved it. At the end an outstanding "dazed and confused" portrayal by Richard Mulligan as an egotistical and crazy General Custer. (Was the real Custer really that stupid?) Too long and too contrived for me. Dustin Hoffman's acting is very uneven. It's brilliant at times yet unpolished and unfunny.

Everyone i've talked to about this film has said to me, "Oh, it's just like the book". No, it is not! True, the gist of many of the scenes in the film resemble scenes in the novel, but only in the most rudimentary way. As cinematic as the book seems, it actually presents a major problem to any adaptor who wants to do anything like justice to it in a screen adaptation: I would say over two-thirds of the entire book is narration, and most of its scenes, as cinematic as they may seem, are embedded in this narration, and while there is also a great deal of dialogue, these scenes are tempered by passages where key things that happen are rendered in print only through vague description in the narration, of the "Oh, and then this happened" sort - meaning that anyone who wanted to turn this book into a movie where there is any kind of successful narrative flow that does justice to the book's sustained vision and creativity would have to do a LOT of creative work filling in these gaps, turning Berger's intermittent vagueness into specific screen action that matches in tone the dialogue and action Berger has already supplied. It's the kind of problem one can only envision being solved satisfactorily by bringing in the author himself to do the adaptation. In this respect, the filmmakers have failed utterly - there is not one second of this film that is anywhere near as inspired or witty as anything in the book. As craftsmanship, the film is mediocre; the film looks like it was shot on a soundstage, and gives the viewer no feeling for nature or the absurd, crazy poetry of American Indian life that is so much a part of what makes the book so successful; Berger's superbly sophisticated and imaginative moral absurdism has been turned into crude, ugly, cheap, cartoonish left-wing caricature that resembles the work of Oliver Stone; and, aside from the one glorious exception of Chief Dan George, in his wonderful turn as Old Lodge Skins, the performances are gross, sloppy and impersonal, with Dustin Hoffman terribly miscast, his innocent, square, adenoidal man-child persona subtly but completely wrong for the sketchiness and semi-amoral pragmatism of Jack Crabb, a man who drifts between two opposed lifestyles, American and Indian, forming no loyalty with either – a character which would require a projection, not of guilt or corruption, but of simple adult knowledge, something Hoffman is incapable of.