SOLDIER BLUE (1970)

The notoriety of Soldier Blue’s climactic scene, depicting in savage detail the slaughter of a Native American community by US soldiers, has so completely dominated the film’s reputation since its release that the rest of it is somewhat forgotten. The filmmakers themselves were far from unaware of the impact this scene would have, and melodramatic opening titles lead to the suggestion that “the greatest horror of all is that it is true,” while the title song by Buffy Sainte-Marie promises to “tell you a story, it’s a true one.”

This itself is only true to a point; the scene is indeed based on the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, where perhaps 150 Native Americans were killed, but much was altered and the central story featuring Candice Bergen and Peter Strauss is fictional. Equally potent at the time, though, were the obvious parallels between this mass murder and the revelations about the killing of Vietnamese civilians by American troops at My Lai, which were escalating into a media storm while the movie was in production.

My Lai, as well as the period’s more restrained approach to explicit screen violence and perhaps the relative unfamiliarity of revisionist Westerns then, explains what might now seem like an overreaction to this sequence. The American critic Leonard Maltin described it as “almost unwatchable,” and Time magazine opined that “even the Sharon Tate murderers might have blanched at such a scene.” To a viewer in 2024, perhaps desensitised by the subsequent half-century of increasingly graphic and realistic carnage on screen, the portrayal of the incident (as opposed to the actual incident) is not in truth that disturbing—what we see is certainly dreadful, but no more so than in countless other films in genres like the Western, war, and crime. The absence of hype nowadays around Soldier Blue, a controversial and commercially very successful film at the time of its release, undoubtedly also helps us see it in perspective.

Soldier Blue is, then, a “Vietnam film” and not just in the way that half the movies made in the US during the late-1960s and early-1970s owed something to the context of the Vietnam War. A direct metaphor here is very clear. But it’s also a “Native American film,” and while its violence is no longer quite as shocking as it once must have been, its treatment of Native Americans still comes across as fresh, original, and relatively intelligent—more so than many other aspects of the film.

Today, highly sympathetic screen portrayals of Native Americans are the norm, to the point that they’ve become a cliché themselves, and their positivity lacks impact: if all Native American characters are “good,” then the goodness of any specific one isn’t particularly meaningful. (A film like Scott Cooper’s 2017 Hostiles, where it feels like stereotypes of barbarity have simply been replaced by stereotypes of wisdom and nobility, is a perfect example.) And there had, perhaps surprisingly, been plenty of positive portrayals during the silent era, for instance, D.W Griffith’s The Massacre (1912) and Francis Ford’s The Invaders (1912).

But for a long period in between, Hollywood made barely any attempt to depict Native Americans in a well-rounded manner; there was the occasional “good” noble savage to counterbalance all the vicious war-whooping ones, of course, but even they were far from fully developed characters. And, as Dan Georgakas points out in his insightful essay on the Native Americans in the movies in The Political Companion to American Film (to which I am indebted), Native Americans were rarely “the true subject” even in a film where they played a significant role; though there was the odd exception, most of the time they were seen purely in their relation to the white man, usually as threats or obstacles, occasionally as allies.

This started changing again in the ’60s and ’70s with films like Abraham Polonsky’s Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969), Robert Aldrich’s oddly neglected Ulzana’s Raid (1972)—possibly the best Western of the period, both thrilling and thoughtful—and Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976). Perhaps the best-known example is Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (1970); General Custer, who’d been a hero in Raoul Walsh’s They Died With Their Boots On (1941), was by this point presented as a monster. The new preference for giving the Native American point of view at least equal weight to the white one has continued right up to Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves (1990) and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), and all Westerns nowadays are “revisionist” in this sense.

However, whether Native Americans truly gained equal treatment with whites on screen, even in films ostensibly much less arrogant than their predecessors, is highly debatable. Many of them are, for instance, touted as representing Native American life authentically, but what this often means in practice is simply that they are less wildly inaccurate than earlier movies, while still playing to a white audience’s ideas of what the Native American world “ought” to be like, and still preferring to foreground white characters.

This is entirely true of Soldier Blue, whose agenda swiftly becomes apparent after its portentous opening titles. It may open with a glimpse of a Native American village but then shifts to a scene with settlers and soldiers, on whom it will focus almost exclusively for the rest of its running time. Native Americans act and are acted upon, but all of this occurs in relation to white characters. The philosophical differences between Cresta (Bergen) and Honus (Strauss) are explored in far greater depth than the much greater ones between them and the Cheyenne and Kiowa they encounter. The horror of the final massacre is witnessed largely through the reactions of Cresta and Honus, and some of it stems not just from the sheer physical brutality, but from the fact that it is perpetrated by white people who “ought to know better.”

Set in Colorado in 1877, Soldier Blue throws together Honus, a young cavalry private, and Cresta, a white woman recently rescued from the Cheyenne after being abducted by them. Such abductions were a common trope in silent films, and of course, Cresta’s situation also echoes that of Debbie (Natalie Wood) in John Ford’s The Searchers (1956). Like Debbie, Cresta doesn’t seem to have been an entirely unwilling captive and has become the wife of the Cheyenne chief Spotted Wolf (Jorge Rivero, in a typical instance of a Hispanic actor being cast as a Native American).

But she still has a fiancé in the military. When she and Honus are the only survivors of a Cheyenne attack on the small group they are travelling with, they must continue on a perilous journey to Fort Reunion—the nearest outpost of civilisation, complete with fiancé—on their own.

In plot terms, Soldier Blue thus sets up several questions: not only will the pair make it to Fort Reunion, but will romance blossom between this unlikely couple (he’s rather prim and proper, she’s an utterly implausible hippy chick transplanted to the 19th-century)? And if so, which man will Cresta eventually choose? The bulk of the film follows them on their journey, during which they have significant encounters with a group of Kiowa and a gun trader, Cumber (Donald Pleasance). Then, as the climax approaches, it reintroduces both the US military under Colonel Iverson (John Anderson) and Spotted Wolf’s Cheyenne.

Throughout, Soldier Blue takes every opportunity to contrast Honus and Cresta, sometimes to humorous effect. However, it often does so to virtue-signal its own and Cresta’s support for the beleaguered Native Americans. Honus’s father was a soldier who died at Little Bighorn with Custer. Cresta lectures him about army atrocities, declares “This isn’t my country, it’s Indian country,” and treats him with traditional Native American medicine when he is wounded—perhaps the symbolic beginning of his inevitable change in attitude.

Unfortunately, little of this is believable at all, and the convincing period feel of other scenes largely disintegrates when we see Cresta and Honus alone. Both are very clearly actors performing for the camera (in locations that also feel somehow unreal—perhaps too carefully prepared?—even though they’re actual exteriors, not a studio backlot).

She’s certainly a potentially interesting character—strong, unpredictable—and Bergen makes her watchable enough by exploiting this. However, there’s not a trace of the 19th-century about her, or of frontier hardships: as Honus says, “You look all shiny and beautiful.” Strauss, meanwhile, is simply dreadful. Even allowing for the fact that the character of Honus (nicknamed Soldier Blue by Cresta) is meant to be pompous and over-formal, there’s nothing remotely natural about him. A hint of Scooby-Doo’s Shaggy can push his performance towards absurdity. Pleasance is far more naturalistic in his relatively small role, stealing attention from the leads with his slightly OTT portrayal of Cumber, amiable enough on the surface but clearly dangerous.

Director Ralph Nelson and screenwriter John Gay (adapting the 1969 novel Arrow in the Sun by the prolific Western author Theodore V. Olsen) were both experienced and versatile. Their film does carry off some individual shots very well—like a snake disappearing into the skeleton of an animal—and some longer sequences are also well-executed. Honus and Cresta’s encounter with a group of Kiowa stands out, as does a passage where the pair hide from Cumber in a cave. In the Kiowa section, Gay also makes a serious attempt to get across a Native American point of view without turning it into a lesson. Elsewhere, however, especially in caricaturing the military, his writing can be overdone: just as Spotted Wolf embraces Cresta, a voiceover from Colonel Iverson speaks of the “dark abominations of these godless barbarians.”

More importantly, the film is badly let down by its bizarrely mixed moods. A humorous set piece where Honus tries to shoot a goat and gets a rabbit instead is amusing enough in itself, but it belongs in a different movie; so too does the blatantly sexual scene where Honus chews at a rope that is binding Cresta. Wasn’t this supposed to be about the US genocide of Native Americans? Where are they? Why has it suddenly become a rom-com or an erotic fantasy?

The musical by Roy Budd, then at the very beginning of his career, does Soldier Blue no favours either. Like Gay’s writing, it’s far too varied—dreamy, then comical, then tense, then resorting to a breezy old-fashioned Western genre idiom—to successfully sustain any mood at all, and is beset by too many literal-minded musical responses to the on-screen action. For instance, when a wagon catches fire, Budd’s score emphasises it with sudden drama; like the rest of the music, this accentuates the moment (unnecessarily in this case, because the audience already knows the wagon is on fire anyway) but does nothing to shape the film as a whole.

To be fair, the famous massacre scene is well done by all concerned, and even if it’s not as thoroughly shocking as its reputation suggests, parts of it are: the brief but horrifying shots of torture, the beheading of a child by a man on horseback, countless bodies in a ditch afterwards. It has one of the most effective moments in Budd’s score, too, where ironically jaunty music gives way to much simpler, ominous drums as the troops depart the burned village.

For the most part, however, just like the score, the film seems unsure of itself. After the massacre, Cresta mocks Honus: “Got a prayer, Soldier Blue? A nice poem? Say something pretty.” Her point, of course, is that the soldiers’ brutal killings expose the lie of his assumptions about being on the civilised side. Yet, the entire film up to this point has largely been beautiful and unthreateningly poetic, treating both Honus and Cresta with a gentle affection that she now suggests is undeserved.

Of course, one could argue that this huge shift in tone is intentional, a strength rather than a weakness of the film; that it’s showing us white happiness before revealing at the end how that happiness was underpinned by terrible cruelty. But if so, it would be the only truly subtle element in the whole of Soldier Blue, and I think it’s far more likely a sign of conceptual incoherence.

The film’s confusion is indeed typified by its very last line: a voiceover quoting General Nelson A. Miles, who later became Chief of Staff of the US Army, in which he describes the Sand Creek Massacre as the “foulest and most unjust crime in the annals of America.” This must have seemed like a good idea at the time, balancing the grand rhetoric of the opening titles with a similar pronouncement at the end, just in case the audience hadn’t grasped the point that the military were the bad guys here.

Yet it makes a nonsense of the film, at least partially, by implying that Iverson’s unit was acting as renegades and that their conduct would not have been approved at higher levels—in other words, that persecution of the Native Americans was not systemic but merely a series of individual crimes by extremists, not reflective of the prevailing view. Historically, of course, this may not be a justifiable conclusion (and Miles himself was very active in the Indian Wars). But still, presenting a military leader of all people as the voice of humane reason undermines everything that has gone before. It’s one more misjudgment in a movie so full of them.

USA | 1970 | 115 MINUTES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Blu-ray Special Features:

• Available in 4K UHD SteelBook, Blu-ray and DVD formats.
• New 4K restoration of the film. The bonus features are limited, but the restored picture and sound make up for that—bright, colourful and truly gorgeous, this restoration shows off the movie to the best possible effect. Of course, this still doesn’t make it a great film, but for anyone who does want to watch Soldier Blue, they won’t get a better experience than this.
• Interview with Candice Bergen. A fairly short and not particularly interesting interview with Bergen, conducted for this release by Jim Kunz, padded out with over-long excerpts from the movie. Among other recollections, Bergen claims to have come up with the movie’s title.
• Commentary by Steve Mitchell and Howard S. Berger. An engaging new commentary by two film historians who’ve worked together on several other discs. It’s a wide-ranging discussion around the film, rather than focusing on what’s on-screen at a given moment, and benefits greatly from its conversational format. Particularly valuable is its discussion of people who worked on the movie beyond the obvious writer, director and stars—for example, the composer Roy Budd and producer Joseph E. Levine.
• English subtitles.
• Four art cards with the Blu-ray version.

Cast & Crew

director: Ralph Nelson.
writer: John Gay (based on the novel ‘Arrow in the Sun’ by Theodore V. Olsen).
starring: Candice Bergen, Peter Strauss, Donald Pleasance, John Anderson, Dana Elcar & Jorge Rivero.