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Even Dwarfs Started Small

1970 · 1h 36m · Not Rated Comedy, Drama
Directed by Werner Herzog

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Overview

The inhabitants of an institution in a remote country rebel against their keepers. Their acts of rebellion are by turns humorous, boring and alarming. An allegory on the problematic nature of fully liberating the human spirit, as both commendable and disturbing elements of our nature come forward. The film shows how justifiable revolt may be empowering, but may also turn to chaos and depravity. The allegory is developed in part by the fact that the film is cast entirely with dwarfs

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Critics on Rotten Tomatoes

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100%
Tomatometer
Fresh

Even Dwarfs Started Small eventually is indistinguishable from its Germanic, side-show spectacle, as if it were a movie that had been conceived by the same kind of perverse, uninvolved intelligence that had created the world of the film.

Vincent Canby, New York Times
Fresh

Not a vicious denial of the legitimacy of revolt (as too many critics have charged) but a bitter lament over the disservice revolutionaries do their revolutions.

Don Druker, Chicago Reader

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