To play the ancient Jack Crabb, Dustin Hoffman wore a prosthetic mask that took five hours a day to apply. To achieve the rasping, aged voice, Hoffman reportedly spent hours screaming in his dressing room before filming to "trash" his vocal cords.
The movie is based on the 1964 novel by Thomas Berger , a satirical picaresque that helped establish the "Revisionist Western" genre in literature. Little Big Man
While ostensibly a tall tale about 121-year-old Jack Crabb, (1970) remains one of the most culturally significant films for how it single-handedly demolished the "heroic" myth of the American West. The "Flower Power" Indian To play the ancient Jack Crabb, Dustin Hoffman
Unlike the faceless "savages" of previous decades, the film portrayed Native Americans as a complex society—what the Cheyenne call the "Human Beings". While ostensibly a tall tale about 121-year-old Jack
Released during the height of the Vietnam War, the film is widely viewed as a protest piece.
The harrowing depiction of the U.S. Army attacking Native villages was a direct cinematic parallel to the real-world My Lai Massacre .