Soldier Blue (1970): Vietnam Allegory Via Violent Revisionist Western (Review)

“I saw the bodies of those lying there cut all to pieces, worse mutilated than any I ever saw before; the women cut all to pieces … With knives; scalped; their brains knocked out; children two or three months old; all ages lying there, from sucking infants up to warriors … By whom were they mutilated? By the United States troops …”

The above quote is taken from the congressional testimony of John S. Smith in 1865. The violence he is describing occured on November 29th of the previous year in the South Eastern Colorado territory. Under the command of US Volunteers Colonel John Chivington, a 675-man force of the US Army’s Third Colorado Cavalry attacked and destroyed a peaceful village of Cheyenne and Arapaho people, an indigenous population mostly made up of women and their infant young. This ‘military action’, a blind killing rage of rape, murder, mutilation and pillage, became known as the Sand Creek Massacre and it is estimated that anywhere between 69 to 600 Native Americans were put to death that day. Chivington himself estimated that “500 to 600 warriors were killed”, but most sources have claimed the total was nearer to 150, two-thirds of which were indeed made up of woman and children.

Like many colonialist massacres, from Peterloo to Jallianwala Bagh, Sand Creek wasn’t about to trouble the approved curriculum, nor was it about to be depicted on the big screen by the likes of the two Johns, Ford and Wayne. But by 1970, the tide was turning. Faced on a daily basis with the horrors of Vietnam being broadcast to the nation, “the war in your living room”, many Americans began to consider not only their role in the world, but also their role in the history of the land they called free – the United States. Taking the T.V. Olsen novel Arrow in the Sun and the recent disclosure in November 1969 of the My Lai Massacre, the mass murder of somewhere between 347 and 504 unarmed Vietnamese civilians by the US Army in the Sơn Tịnh district of South Vietnam on 16th March 1968, director Ralph Nelson and screenwriter John Gay set out to provide the first, truthful cinematic account of the Sand Creek Massacre, drawing parallels with the ongoing conflict in South Asia, with their movie Soldier Blue.

Their movie, released to Blu-ray this week by Studio Canal’s Cult Classics label, was applauded for its uncompromisingly frank depiction of an inconvenient truth, as evinced by the tagline “The Story They Were Afraid To Talk About Becomes the Movie They Can’t Stop Talking About”. Immediately coined “The Most Savage Film in History”, Soldier Blue became a massive hit here in the UK (where the film’s eponymous theme tune, sung with in a devastating, haunting vibrato by Native American (or so we believed at the time) singer Buffy Sainte-Marie, reached number 7 in the charts in the late summer of 1971) and indeed much of Europe (the Italians, so beloved of their gruesome Spaghetti Westerns, loved the violence, as Candice Bergen notes in an interview included on the disc’s extras), but failed to find much of an audience in the US where the truth, and its contemporaneous parallels, proved too difficult to stomach. Nevertheless, Soldier Blue‘s pushing of the envelope in terms of screen violence had a lasting cinematic legacy, with many critics citing its influence on the more exploitative fare that would appear a decade later, the “video nasties” such as Italy’s own Cannibal Holocaust.

Whilst it is true that Nelson employs a gratuitous visual excess in Soldier Blue, it’s important to remember that, for much of the movie’s runtime, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re watching a very traditional Western adventure. Violence bookends Soldier Blue, opening as it does with a bloody Cheyenne ambush of a US Cavalry paywagon and concluding with the aforementioned massacre. When the smoke clears from the opening battle, we’re introduced to its two survivors – and the movie’s protagonists – a greenhorn Colorado Private Honus Gant (Peter Strauss) and Cresta Lee (Candice Bergen), a beautiful young woman who was being escorted to Fort Reunion, where her officer fiancé is waiting for her. What follows is the kind of odd couple romance against adversity (in this case, the duo are forced to trek a hundred miles across hostile open territory) that was par for the course for Hollywood; think everything from The African Queen to True Grit. Now, if that doesn’t sound particularly revisionist, it’s because it really isn’t.

Though we must credit Nelson and Gay with switching up the gender norms of this chalk and cheese pairing, as it is Cresta who is the closest to the John Wayne stereotype here. The crusty, commonsensical one of the pair, she routinely proves herself as the most capable, undermining the devotion to country and duty that the naive Honus possesses with a mixture of pragmatism and derision. Indeed, it is her who coins the nickname “Soldier Blue” for her guileless companion as she reveals that she has lived with the Cheyenne, and had been a bride of its warrior chief Spotted Wolf (Jorge Rivero), for two years. Bergen delivers a spirited and engaging performance even if her character’s authenticity is somewhat sacrificed by her contemporary glamour and sex appeal, including the director’s insistence that she wear rubber moulds to enhance her breasts. Strauss is a little harder to warm to, but a good deal of that is down to his rather wet characterisation. Nevertheless, he displays an emotional vulnerability that is wholly right for the role and, by the end, he’s very sympathetic.

There is criticism therefore that much of Soldier Blue is an average movie that would be unremarkable were it not for the uncompromising depiction of Sand Creek in its final reel. But I personally think there’s something wholly deliberate in how Nelson uses violence here. Like I say, it tops and tails the movie, but everything in between is rather bloodless, and I think that it is purposefully so; no matter what threat Honus and Cresta face, be it the Kiowa horsemen whose chief challenges the young soldier to a fight to the death (which Honus only wins when the chief falls headfirst into a rock) or Donald Pleasence’s toothy caricature of a wily old trader, the outlandishly named Isaac Q. Cumber, en route to selling arms to the Cheyenne that very likely killed Honus’ comrades at the start, it’s important that they aren’t shown to be violent characters themselves.

This decision to set them wholly apart from the other characters they encounter, makes their innocence all the more heart rending in the final act, which sees them both unable to stop the brutality they find themselves witness to. Cresta can do nothing other than attempt to shelter the women and children, and is only spared the fate that befalls them because of her own white skin. Meanwhile Honus, horrified by the raging bloodlust he sees in his fellow soldiers, is left to wander the battlefield impotently expressing both his disgust and incomprehension. When he sees John Anderson’s Colonel Iverson, his commanding officer and the film’s thinly-veiled Colonel Chivington, shoot dead a little Indigineous girl, he scoops her up into his arms and bears down on the old man, blindly demanding “Why?”, a behaviour which leads Iverson to remark “He’s mad”. Note that it’s Honus’ refusal to kill innocent women and children that is given the charge of insanity and not the inhumanity of his fellow soldiers. Besides which, this wasn’t the first Western to subvert not only audiences expectations but what had gone on before in the narrative; Budd Boetticher’s swansong A Time for Dying from the previous year would also deploy this trick, with a death of innocence finale that would also intentionally bring to mind the war in Vietnam.

Whatever the intentions of Soldier Blue, it is the massacre sequence that remains etched on the mind of those who watch the movie. What begins with the factually correct depiction of the US Army ignoring the white flag being raised by the Cheyenne and Arapaho people leads into an equally accurate fifteen minutes of unflinchingly, Peckinpah-esque gruesome violence. Sequences of beheadings and other bodily mutilations (one soldier is shown to cut at the breasts of a woman he’s attempting to rape), the stampeding of children attempting to flee the scene whilst others their age are being mown down in a hail of bullets, are all performed by whooping and cackling blood-crazed cavalrymen, and remain a distressingly difficult watch to this day. Many may quibble that this feels excessive, exploitative and gratuitous given the context of the rest of the movie, but equally it’s important to consider how impactful a sequence this actually is by the very virtue of it coming so unexpectedly. Whatever your personal view, there’s no denying that the final act of Nelson’s film has you sitting up in your seat, even if you may find yourself occassionally turning away from the screen.

An angry film that dared to challenge the very Western mythology that America prides itself in being built upon, a mythology that continues to be updated to characterise the country’s position on the global stage, Soldier Blue continues to challenge audiences too. Viewed in 1970, its narrative found an obvious comparison with the war crimes being committed in Vietnam. Released now to Blu-ray in 2024, it’s impossible to view Soldier Blue without thinking of the war crimes that Israel, supported by America and the West, are committing against the Palestinian people. This Studio Canal release delivers a beautifully crisp 4K restoration of the original print and contains a commentary by Steve Mitchell and Howard S. Berger and a twelve-minute interview with Candice Bergen which is a delight frankly. For all its grimness, Bergen describes the making of the movie as a very happy and fun-filled experience, breaking into fits of laughter as she recalls how her car-sick dog spectacularly vomited on Strauss as they travelled to one of the shoot’s locations and how, a couple of years later, her daughter inadvertantly gave Strauss’s family the measles. The release is available as a special edition steel book and as a standard issue, including complimentary postcards. It’s important to note that the massacre sequence has been edited slightly for this release by the BBFC on the grounds of the Protection of Children Act, as one of the rape scenes had originally included a child actor at the edge of the frame.

Mark’s Archive – Soldier Blue (1970)