Film

Little Big Man

Name: Little Big Man
Genre: Western, Comedy, Adventure, Drama
Released: 1970
Cast: Dustin Hoffman, Faye Dunaway, Chief Dan George, Martin Balsam, Richard Mulligan

Dustin Hoffman plays the 121-year-old sole white survivor of Little Bighorn, spinning a shaggy, tragicomic tall tale that swings from slapstick to massacre without warning. It's a satire dressed as an epic — Custer as preening lunatic, the frontier as grift — made in 1970 with Vietnam very much on its mind. For anyone who likes their history irreverent and their heroes fake.

TMDb rating

7.4

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McCabe & Mrs. Miller1971

Altman's mud-and-whiskey anti-western strips away every myth Little Big Man is busy mocking, replacing gunfighter romance with commerce, weather, and a doomed little frontier town nobody will remember.

But Deliberately mumbly and meandering — plot takes a backseat to atmosphere, which frustrates viewers wanting momentum.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid1969

Same era, same appetite for turning the Old West into a wry, doomed buddy comedy, with charm doing the work that Little Big Man hands to Hoffman's grin.

But Much gentler and more nostalgic — it flirts with myth rather than dismantling it outright.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid poster

Dances with Wolves1990

Another white man absorbed into a Native community and forced to watch his own civilization arrive as catastrophe, but played straight and sweeping instead of picaresque.

But Three hours of earnest reverence where Little Big Man has jokes — some will find it self-important by comparison.

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Something you would not have found on your own.

Reel Injun2010

Little Big Man's Old Lodge Skins is a beloved but still constructed 'wise Indian' figure; this film unpacks exactly where that figure came from and what it cost.

A sharp, funny, clear-eyed documentary tour through a century of Hollywood's Native American stereotypes — the exact archetypes Little Big Man both trades in and gently mocks, examined from the outside.

But Talking-heads documentary pacing; less entertainment than education, though it's a lively one.

Unforgiven1992

Eastwood's late, grim reckoning with the western hero does for gunfighter legend what Little Big Man does for Custer — expose the ugly machinery behind the legend.

But Cold and mournful where Little Big Man is puckish; little of the earlier film's comic energy survives here.

The Outlaw Josey Wales1976no page yet

A wandering, episodic western with a similar dry wit and a similarly sour view of official history, plus a real tenderness toward the Native characters it meets along the way.

But More conventional shoot-outs and revenge plotting than the freewheeling satire of Little Big Man.

Forrest Gump1994

Take the structure — a simple-seeming narrator bumbling through the making of American history — and run it forward a century; the DNA is unmistakably the same.

But Sentimental where its ancestor is scabrous; some will find the niceness cloying after Little Big Man's bite.

Blazing Saddles1974

If you want the satire turned up to eleven and the jokes made explicit instead of implied, Brooks' anarchic send-up hits the same targets with a sledgehammer.

But Broader, sillier, and less interested in genuine tragedy — pure comedy where Little Big Man keeps one foot in horror.

Dead Man Walking1995

Jarmusch's black-and-white fever dream of a western shares the same instinct to make the frontier strange, absurd, and quietly damning rather than heroic.

But Slow, deadpan, and willfully weird — a real patience test for anyone expecting narrative momentum.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford2007

A meditation on how legends get made and who profits from them, told with the same melancholy undertow beneath Little Big Man's tall-tale surface.

But Very slow and interior — gorgeous but glacial, with almost none of the earlier film's comic release.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford poster

Reservation Dogs2021

Little Big Man imagines Native life through a white narrator's affectionate gaze; this show flips that gaze entirely, and the difference is the whole point.

A wickedly funny, tender coming-of-age series about Indigenous teens in Oklahoma, written and directed almost entirely by Native creators — the story told from inside the tipi instead of outside it.

But Contemporary and low-key rather than epic; nothing here resembles a battle scene or a historical sweep.

Ride the High Country1962

Made eight years earlier, it's the moment the genre started admitting its own lies, laying the groundwork for the satire Little Big Man would later blow wide open.

Peckinpah's elegiac, quietly bitter western about two aging lawmen finding the frontier already a fraud shows the myth curdling years before revisionism became fashionable.

But Old-fashioned pacing and a straight face throughout — none of Little Big Man's absurdist comedy or narrative trickery.