Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs 

Dustin Hoffman is older than I am but I feel like I've grown up with him.

He started out as The Young Man in The Graduate (1967), as The Young Punk in Midnight Cowboy (1969), and as The Young Failure in Straw Dogs (1971). But whatever character he was playing, he was Young. Even now his youthfulness lets him get away with playing roles a decade or more younger than he is.

In The New Biographical Dictionary of Film film critic David Thomson says that Dustin Hoffman has always been a character actor instead of a leading man. According to Thomson, Hoffman “does not idealize himself enough to make a woman's awe natural.” In other words, Hoffman isn't vain enough to make it believable when the female lead falls for him.

Maybe that attitude of rational self regard is what made Hoffman appealing to some male viewers who were themselves no Warren Beattys or Robert Redfords.

Looking back on my memories of my first viewings of a lot of Dustin Hoffman's movies, I realize that they made me think as much as they made me feel. Hoffman often explained himself. (From Tootsie: “I was a better man as a woman than I ever was as a man.”)

Hoffman's best movies came out in the 1970s and early 80s.

In Straw Dogs Hoffman played a mathematician who gave himself over to his repressed violent nature in order to claim his wife, not to protect her, from a pack of foreign men. His reason made him decide to become violent. He wasn't pushed over the edge by his emotions. Like Dr. Jekyll, he calmly chose to drink the potion and unleash his animal side.

Arthur Penn's Little Big Man (1970) starring Hoffman was a western version of Penn's Bonnie and Clyde. (Bonnie and Clyde came out in 1967, at the same time as Hoffman's The Graduate. This was recognized even at the time as the moment when American movies changed in subject and tone).

Dustin Hoffman's other brilliant movies from the 1970s include Papillon, Lenny, and Kramer vs. Kramer. I think you have to let Tootsie (1982) sneak into this group, since this was when movies started to spend at least a year or two in “development hell” on their way to being made.

It's funny, but during the Reagan-Thatcher years American movies turned to crap while British films had a short renaissance (due in part to government subsidies that were eventually cut). My favorite British movies from that time were Letter to Brezhnev (1985) and My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), and Mona Lisa (1986). In America we had the beginnings of the huge “franchises” - - the Rockys, Rambos, Terminators, and Aliens, and childish right-wing fantasies like Red Dawn (1984).

But then Hoffman played his most interesting character since the mathematician in Straw Dogs.

Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man 

In Rain Man (1988) Hoffman plays Raymond, a character who also manipulates numbers. Raymond is autistic and has been institutionalized. Tom Cruise plays his brother, an exemplar of 1980s greed. The fact that Raymond can't change - - he's at the mercy of his obsessive-compulsive disorder - - forces his brother to change.

It's hard to believe there's an actor inside Raymond while you watch the movie.

Since Rain Man Dustin Hoffman has done some good movies (Wag the Dog) and some bad movies (Meet the Fockers). In both of those movies Hoffman worked with Robert De Niro.

Maybe that just means that great actors want to make good movies, but they do what they have to.