Soldier Blue

Plot synopsis:
A young woman, Cresta Lee (Bergen), and young U.S. private Honus Gant (Strauss) are joined together by fate when they are the only two survivors after their group is massacred by the Cheyenne. Gant is devoted to his country and duty; Lee, who has lived with the Cheyenne for two years, declares that in this conflict she sympathizes more with them. The two must now try to make it to Fort Reunion, the army base camp, where Cresta's fiance, an army officer, waits for her. As they travel through the desert with very low supplies, hiding from the Indians, they are spotted by a group of Kiowa horsemen. Under pressure from Cresta, Honus fights and seriously wounds the group's chief. Honus finds himself unable to kill the chief, and the chief's own men stab him for his defeat and leave Honus and Cresta alone.
Eventually, after being shot at by a white trader (played by Donald Pleasence) who had supplied guns to the Cheyenne, Honus finds himself in a cave where Cresta has left him to get help. She arrives at Fort Reunion, only to discover that her fiance's cavalry plans to attack the peaceful Indian village of the Cheyenne the following day. She runs away on a horse and reaches the village in time to warn Spotted Wolf, the Cheyenne chief. The chief refuses to indulge in warfare and rides out to extend a hand of friendship to the American soldiers using the U.S. flag. The soldiers, however, obey the orders of their commanding officer to open fire at the village. After a cavalry charge decimates the Indian men, the soldiers enter the village and begin to rape and kill the female survivors as Honus attempts to disrupt the massacre. Cresta attempts to lead the remaining women and children to safety, but her group is discovered and massacred while Cresta herself is spared. After the battle, Honus is led away in shackles and Cresta departs with the remaining survivors.

Tags: anti war, violence, revenge, murder, flashback

Review:
Olsen's novel "Arrow In The Sun", SOLDIER BLUE, directed by Ralph Nelson (of CHARLY and LILIES OF THE FIELD fame), stars Candice Bergen and Peter Strauss as, respectively, a Cheyenne-raised white woman and a disenfranchised U.S. Cavalry officer who have survived a savage attack by Cheyenne Indians on an Army payroll wagon train and are forced to be together to survive, even as they disagree starkly on who is right in the white man-versus-Indian conflict.
But it also leaves the viewer heavily unprepared for the incredibly horrific massacre that climaxes the film.Even today, this massacre, a sequence of unbelievably extreme violence that involves hacked body parts, rape, and infinite bloodshed, makes SOLDIER BLUE very difficult for viewers to watch.
Apart from the brutal nature of that final sequence, the film's depiction of the Army as a bunch of bloodthirsty savages does not make SOLDIER BLUE an easy film to agree with--and contrary to what a previous reviewer said, I don't think it even comes close to being a politically correct movie.
The film's two protaganists(Candice Bergen and Peter Strauss, a US cavalry trooper), escape from Indians who have attacked an Army wagon train(carrying amongst other things The soldiers wages).
Don't miss the beginning at any cost.Or else you would not hear Buffy Sainte-Marie's eponymous anthemic song (Yes this is my country,young and growing free and flowing from sea to sea...).The version of the song as performed here features a string arrangement not present in the original version (which is to be found on BSM's "she used to wanna be a ballerina",vanguard).This song is as moving today as it was 30 years ago,and when the singer implores "can't you see there's another way to love her?" it gains an universal meaning(not only American natives or Vietnamese as it was mooted at the time for the movie)The movie is famous for the slaughter which ends it.Terribly realistic ,it remains impressive today and may repel some viewers.There's a very strong use of the score during these scenes.But most of the movie deals with the initiatory journey of a young naive soldier,"educated " by a woman who was captured by the Indians and had to live with them for a while.Candice Bergen's performance came aside as a shock at the time because she used to play frail young maids (Robert Wise's "the sand pebbles";Claude Lelouch's "vivre pour vivre" ) before.But there's a problem:her character is not really believable;just compare her with the heroines with a similar fate in Ford's movies :"the searchers" ,1956;"two rode together",1961..They are far from Crista 's outspoken and politically aware character.Actually ,it seems that this woman is a contemporary woman,with Joan Baez's, Buffy Sainte-Marie's or Jane Fonda's mind (in the late sixties)..For all that,"soldier blue " is worth watching and superbly uses wide screen :the landscapes match Sainte-Marie's song.Primarily an intimate movie,for most of the time there are only two people on the screen.Hence the contrast with the violent finale..
Well, nearly the whole film tells the love story of a woman who has grown up at the Indians and an American soldier as well as their survival in the wilderness.
The last 15 minutes however have the same shocking effect other controversial films like "Cannibal Holocaust" or "I spit on your grave" have got: it is shown how the US-cavalry massacres/slaughters an innocent and peaceful Indian tribe, how children get killed or even beheaded, women get raped and tortured to death, how genocide was done in the name of freedom, democracy and liberality.
A positive aspect of "Soldier Blue" is, that this film doesn´t deal with the typical "good Americans/bad Indians"-cliché: in this movie you won´t see a glorious hero like John Wayne riding into the sunset at the end, because "Soldier Blue" shows the darkest side of the American glory..!.
Released in 1970 and directed by Ralph Nelson, "Soldier Blue" is a Western starring Peter Strauss and Candice Bergen as a soldier and Native sympathizer, the only two survivors of a cavalry group Massacred by the Cheyenne.
The opening Indian attack is set in order to align the audience's sympathies with Honus (Strauss, the 'Soldier Blue' of the title), so that the viewer travels on the same journey as him, starting by regarding the Indians as murderous barbarians, and ending up forced to confront the idea that maybe his kin are just as barbaric when the occasion is 'right' (or, should I say, wrong).The final massacre is shocking, but hampered by the film's insistence on stacking the deck so completely in terms of depicting the US military as savages dripping with ee-vil.
"Soldier Blue" is guilty of this but, as a movie, it's entertaining and its message is necessary in light of all the movies that depict Indians as sub-human savages to be gunned down on the spot.The film runs 114 minutes and was shot in Mexico.GRADE: B.
While riding through the Cheyenne territory transporting a safe to Fort Reunion and protecting the white woman Cresta Marybelle Lee (Candice Bergen), who had lived in a Cheyenne village for two years and sympathize with them, the twenty-two men of the cavalry are attacked by the Indians.
When the cavalry attacks, he witnesses the hideous massacre of five hundred peaceful Cheyenne, more than half composed of women and children, and realizes that Cresta was telling the truth.In 1970, I was in my first year of high-school, and my classmates and I went at least three times to the movie theater to see this fictional story based on one of the most hideous crimes of North America history, the Sand Creek Massacre on 24 November 1864, in this awesome and controversial motion picture.
This movie rewrote the Western genre, in a period of Vietnam War, "peace and love" and "Billy Jack", and for the first time the Indians were disclosed as human beings and owners of a land invaded by the "white men".
Soldier Blue chronicles the adventures of Honus (Peter Strauss) and Cresta (Candice Bergen), the only survivors of a Cheyenne Indian attack, as they journey across the wilderness of the old west in search of refuge.
Reflecting the political climate of the time, Soldier Blue is uncompromising in its anti-war stance and its extremely graphic and savage depiction of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864.
We follow the two of them as they make their way through the Wild West...Soldier Blue is actually a really clever film and packs a hell of a lot more of a punch than many other anti-war movies out there.
The anti-war ideology comes through by way of the character of Cresta; an anti-American native Indian sympathiser whose beliefs are the direct opposite of the young soldier she is travelling with.
She makes good points throughout, but director Ralph Nelson never shoves anything down the audience's throats; it's not until the end that the real point of the movie comes through, and while the violence is strong (this film features one of the greatest beheading sequences ever filmed!), it's point is clearly defined and the anti-war message is so much more potent than it would have been if the idea was enforced with a sledge hammer.
A variation on the theme of "Little Big Man," and released in the same year, this film features the conversion of the male protagonist to an Indian phile from a phobe, but this time we end with a terrible massacre of Indians by the U.S. Cavalry, based on the real-life 1864 Sand Creek Massacre of Black Kettle's Cheyenne tribe.
The love interest of Honus (Peter Strauss), Cresta, is played by Candice Bergen, who represents the Indian viewpoint after the start of the film.
Yes this is a very brutal film and some of the blood and guts doesn't look so real now, but this film still has the power to shock you and enable you to feel sympothay with the Native American Indians, who themselves are quite violent in this movie.This movie is basically a love story which also has some factual elements to it, and the two main characters are completely opposite to what one would expect, she is rough and ready whilst "Solider Blue" is young and innocent, but eventually by the end of the film becomes a man who can think for himself.I waited nearly twenty years to see this movie, as at the time, we didn't have a betamax player to watch it on , and i think it was well worth the wait.However one word of waring some of the violence scenes are quite graphic..
Soldier Blue was another Anti US Military/Anti Viet Nam film made in the early 1970's, this time using the nineteenth century American Government's ethnic cleansing policies against the Native American Tribes of the Western Planes as a metaphor for The US Governments Southeast Asian Policy of the Viet Nam Era.The college anti war crowd had "Fallen in Love" with Native American Culture and Hollywood was looking to cash in on their new appreciation of the dark side of the winning of the American West.
Soldier Blue is loosely based on the Sandcreek Massacre of 1863.The film purports to chronicle the events leading up the tragic incident as seen through the eyes of two white people.
That is the big problem with the film.Other then the title song by Buffy Saint Marie there really isn't a whole lot of input from the Indians The Native Americans portrayed are still caricatures and little is revealed about their personalities and viewpoints other then they are the "Noble Savages" and are in need of the sympathetic guidance of the two racially sensitized Caucasians because they are not really sophisticated enough to understand whats going on.While the theme of the movie is certainly a laudable one, that's not enough.The script tries to be politically correct but comes off as condescending.The opening scene has Dana Elcar coming out of an outhouse which winds up being a telling image of story quality of the film itself It also is way too vague in it's historical reference.
"Soldier Blue" is one of these movies that can't find a way between a love story, a tongue-in-cheek western or a political rewiew of a sad and violent episode of the American history.
9) Peter Strauss' primary concern during the runtime of the film is his lack of clean socks, which reminds me of the often repeated tale that our own soldiers in Iraq obsess over things we take for granted like new boots and uncensored copies of Hustler magazine.10) The speech of the cavalry commander before the film's infamous closing slaughter is eerily similar to comments routinely attributed to Vice President Dick Cheney in regards to how he "likes to kill."11) Whatever capacity the final massacre might have had to shock was long evaporated by the film's insistence on stacking the deck so completely in terms of depicting the US military as savage buffoons.
As far as I know Colonel Iverson's attack and massacre on a Cheyenne village was a true fact in American history and this is what "Soldier Blue" is about.
But with that as a final target director Ralph Nelson builds a most entertaining and enjoyable western as a rookie soldier escapes through Indian territory with a white woman rescued from the Cheyennes.Candice Bergen and Peter Strauss play convincingly the main couple and Donald Pleasence is excellent as a colorful and truly nasty gun trader.
So it's surprising how badly this controversial Ralph Nelson oater has fared since its release in 1970.The soundtrack  Buffy Saint Marie's track aside  doesn't help; it places the film squarely in the late sixties, as does the strident attitude of Candice Bergen's hippy chick character, a white woman back with her people after being abducted by Indians.
All the white folk are ignorant trash, whatever their social standing might be, while the Indians  despite a savage massacre of a cavalry unit early in the film, are largely portrayed as noble savages occupying a lofty moral plain unattainable to the whites.No review of Soldier Blue would be complete without some mention of the violence that created such a fuss back in the 70s.
In the end, Bergen and Strauss bear witness to a horrendous massacre in which cavalry soldiers slaughter many Indian women and children in retaliation for the earlier attack.
Calling Gant by the snarky nickname "Soldier Blue," Cresta demonstrates that her years among the "savages" was time well spent, outstripping Gant in survival skills, common sense, and sheer balls, and over their journey toward the fort they must persevere against the elements, a band of hostile Kiowa, an unscrupulous trader  played by Donald Pleasance, here giving one of his most ridiculous performances, and that's saying something  and, in the tradition of many previous western-set romantic comedies, each other.During the course of their misadventures the two opposites are inevitably  and predictably  attracted to each other and eventually end up getting it on  while Gant has a freshly- treated bullet wound that went clean through his leg, no less  in what was surely the only conveniently located cave for at least a twelve mile radius that wasn't filled with rattlesnakes, mountain lions, or who knows what, to say nothing of the Cheyenne, who could have done something really spiffy with such a primo apartment (there I go, thinking in NYC real estate terms again).
No joke, this scene would instantly garner an NC-17 rating if released today, to say nothing of possibly spurring Native American interest groups to riot in the streets over the incredibly exploitative manner in which the atrocities are depicted.I'm all in favor of westerns that don't shy away from honest portrayals of how the west was won, or stolen if truth be told, but this film has no idea of what kind of movie it wants to be; one minute it's a heavy-handed pseudo-hippy lecture about how the treatment of the natives was totally effed up (well, DUH!), then it's a light-hearted battle of the sexes farce wherein Cresta proves herself five times the man Gant is and manages to look hot in her tasty red calico poncho (with no undies), but that all goes out the window when Donald Pleasance shows up with an unintentionally (?) hilarious pair of buck-toothed dentures and our heroes must figure out how to escape from his murderous clutches in a sub-plot that goes nowhere, all of which culminates in the aforementioned apocalyptic climax.
But by trying to be all things to all audiences, SOLDIER BLUE ends up as an incoherent, preachy Mulligan stew of presumably well-intentioned political correctness, but if they were going to tell the story of the Sand Creek Massacre, wouldn't it have been a good idea to have some Indian characters who were more than just walk-ons with Murphy Brown acting as their mouthpiece?
You can just imagine Joseph Levine scratching his chin while reading several scripts on his desk featuring different genres and deciding that he's going to make a movie featuring bits and pieces from all of them so we have 1 ) A love story between two protagonists where opposites attract 2 ) A couple hiking in the great outdoors being kidnapped by a sadistic thug and having to run for their lives 3 ) A standard western that borrows ideas from THE SEARCHERS 4 ) An ( Anti) Vietnam war movie that's the perfect antidote to THE GREEN BERETS All of these are incorporated into SOLDIER BLUE and I'm afraid that it doesn't really work .
There is one slight difference and that is director Ralph Nelson doesn't shy away from showing innocent children getting shot down , even in 2005 the massacre scene still carries an impact and the impact would have been bigger still if the Indians hadn't been shown massacring a Calvary unit earlier , but I guess when discussing what was happening in 'Nam the movie wants to have its cake and eat it It's impossible not to discuss SOLDIER BLUE without mentioning Candice Bergen as Cresta .
But the raison d'etre of this movie - stated, if obliquely, in Buffy St Marie's opening theme song - is the massacre at the end, which is genuinely horrific (if rather dated in terms of special effects).The opening attack is set in order to align the audience's sympathies with Honus, so that we travel on the same journey as him, starting by regarding the Indians as murderous barbarians, and ending up forced to confront the idea that maybe it is we who are barbaric.Peter Strauss and Candice Bergen both give perhaps their best performances ever.An over-sensationalised and under-rated movie..
What the hell is going on?" – Hugh Thompson (helicopter pilot hovering over My Lai) "Soldier Blue" often gets touted as a "revisionist western", but its actually got more in common with exploitation cinema, of which it's one of the genre's best.Directed by Ralph Nelson, "Solder Blue" offers a recreation of the Sand Creek massacre, a horrific incident which occurred in 1864, in which a 700 man force of the Colorado Territory militia, attacked, destroyed and raped a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians.
Almost 200 natives were slaughtered during the attack, most of whom were women and children.But what made "Soldier Blue" popular were its allusions to the Vietnam War. The film was released in 1970, several months after news of the My Lai Massacre (and its attempted cover-up) was leaked to the public.
While the bulk of the movie is a growing 'romance' between a soldier and a woman 'rescued' from indians its the end of the film that made it noteworthy.
What starts off as a typical cowboy/indian western suddenly descends into a very dull romantic 'comedy' about Honus (Soldier Blue of the title played by Peter Strauss) and Cresta (Candice Bergen) who escape an onslaught of the cavalry by the Cheyenne.
Since then, advances in special effects have resulted in far gorier films, but few share the disturbing realism of this movie's climax, which itself is based on the true story of the Sand Creek Massacre by Colorado soldiers led by one Colonel Chivington.