Dustin Hoffman · 1970 · Signature Roles
Jack Crabb claims to be 121 years old, the sole white survivor of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and the film lets him tell his story in flashback: raised by Cheyenne, scout for Custer, gunfighter, drunk, husband, survivor.
Jack Crabb claims to be 121 years old, the sole white survivor of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and the film lets him tell his story in flashback: raised by Cheyenne, scout for Custer, gunfighter, drunk, husband, survivor. Dustin Hoffman plays Crabb at every age, and the performance is a masterclass in adaptation.
Hoffman’s Crabb is not a hero in the western sense. He survives by being small, clever, and willing to change sides — a trickster in a genre built for gunfighters. The humor is dry, the violence is sudden, and the film’s revisionist view of the West — the cavalry as invaders, the Cheyenne as a fully realized people — lands because Hoffman never winks at it. He plays a man who lived through history by refusing to die for anyone’s myth.
