Arthur Penn's Little Big Man is an endlessly entertaining attempt to spin an epic in the form of a yarn.

Hoffman is uncharacteristically charming in a demanding role; the supporting cast is uniformly excellent, particularly Chief Dan George as a befuddled patriarch who takes the supernatural as a matter of course.

It also accomplishes that rarest achievement, the breathing of life into an ossified art form. The '70s has its first great epic.

Little Big Man is a sort of vaudeville show, framed in fictional biography, loaded with sketches of varying degrees of serious and burlesque humor, and climaxed by the Indian victory over Gen George A. Custer at Little Big Horn in 1876.

The dual point of view is used effectively, though it's less valid as social criticism (where Penn's observations tend toward facile revisionism) than as an index of the uncertainty that characterizes most of Penn's heroes.

Episodic western with a great performance from Hoffman.