“I am the last of the ancients. My name is Jack Crabb and I am the only surviving white of the battle of Little Bighorn, called the last fight of Custer.” Thus opens one of the largest frescoes in world cinema, one of the densest and original by its Picaresque aspect, Little Big Man D’Arthur Penn released in 1970 and broadcast Monday May 5, 2025 on Arte with Dustin Hoffman, since followed in the saga My stepfather and me Among other emblematic performances, the American actor, barely thirty and already praised after his roles in The winner et Midnight Cowboy With Jon Voight, father of Angelina Jolie, lends her features to one of the most emblematic anti-heroes of cinema, Jack Crabb.
Que raconte Little Big Man ?
His character, rather Filou, very clever, is adopted by cheyennes after the massacre of his family. As a teenager, he will run away from his Native American tribe to lead an existence of schemes and wandering, not without twists and turns. Throughout his way, constantly torn between two identities, his American culture and his Indian heritage, between morality and personal interest, through a part of the 19th century, he crossed the road to a revering rigid and his frustrated wife, will become charlatan, will find his Native American family, will meet others, and will operate within the cavalry regiment in order to trap them, in particular. Jack Crabb, to whom Dustin Hoffman offers all his malicious candor, will sometimes be charlatan, sometimes beggar, here trapper, there, scout for the cavalry. But it is not quite the faits of the facial of Dustin Hoffman that we discover in the preamble to the film. It is his voice but not so much his face: Jack Crabb presents himself as an old 121 -year -old man, with great reinforcement of impressive makeup, which came a historian, precisely, about the battle of Little Bighorn. A great funny, touching, deep adventure of which certain events are inspired by real facts.
Has the battle of Little Bighorn really existed?
In the heart of Little Big Man, the battle of Little Bighorn, during which General Custer and his troops were killed by the iconic Amerindian chief Sitting Bull and his warriors. The two men and the bloody confrontation that opposed them existed. On June 25 and 26, 1876, 647 men from the 7th cavalry regiment of the American army of Lieutenant-Colonel George A. Custer attack a cheyennes and Sioux camp of several thousand people, including nearly 2,000 warriors, led by the Bull and Crazy Horse chiefs. This operation comes in a broader context: the white authorities hope to buy the local mountains rich in gold in the Amerindians but the negotiations fail. This month of June 1876, around the Little Bighorn river, in Montana, the American cavalry hoped to surround the Amerindians and contain the population, probably in order to massacre part. But the white troops ignore the field and discover a much larger camp than expected. More than 200 members of the cavalry will lose their life, of which General Cluster, which has become a kind of martyr myth of the conquest of the West. The battle of Little Bighorn constitutes a key episode of North American history and continues to be the subject of research as controversies between historians: the behavior of men around Custer and its ignorance of the field which would have divided the regiment divide the specialists. A thousand books would come out each year in connection with the battle and General Custer is the American personality to which the greatest number of works are, to date, devoted. Jack Crabb, sometimes, lied, it’s true, but the battle of Little Bighorn has indeed existed.
