The '70s has its first great epic. Blood brother to the 1903 one-reeler, The Great Train Robbery, Little Big Man is the new western to begin all westerns.

You wind up disappointed, wishing you'd liked it better. It goes wrong in a subtle way -- the wrongness seeping into your bones, so that when the movie is over, you don't really feel like talking about it.

Leaving aside the question of Penn's altering the tone of the movie according to who is being slaughtered, I question the artistic and political ethics of building up the desire for revenge in the audience.

One of the great films of the​ 1970s.