Soldier Blue (1970) Curious how feature filmmakers found a backdoor way to express their outrage and disgust over the war in Vietnam.........especially the My Lai massacre......
The western. Yep, the old, old, old horse opera became the new political cartoon venue.......
Egged on by Sam Peckinpah's blood-soaked 1969 "The Wild Bunch", the 70's ushered in the 'revisionist' western.......where traditional heroes (Cavalry Officers, cowboys, etc) now became racist, bigoted sociopaths and slaughterers of innocents.......
And the Native Americans? In Hollywood parlance, they became the new Vietnamese.....
"Soldier Blue", which finishes up with a horrorshow recreation of the the infamous 1864 Sand Creek massacre of a Cheyenne village by the U.S. Cavalry, was so clumsy and amateurish in its execution, it barely generated the controversy it so craved.
Director Ralph Nelson built a successful film career by blatant emotion pandering....("Lilies Of The Field", "Charly", "Tick...Tick...Tick")......he knew how to play to a crowd with melodrama and pathos.......he even did a warmup to 'Soldier Blue' in his trim, brutal little western "Duel At Diablo", another Indians Vs. Cavalry smackdown.....
But all the worn out Hollywood shtick he used in "Soldier Blue" went awry, blew up in his face and sank the film. 85 per cent of it wasn't even about the massacre......the bulk of the script concentrated on the long tedious trek of two Opposites-Bound-To-Fall-Love......a naif-like soldier (Peter Strauss) and a rescued white captive of the Cheyenne chief (Candice Bergen).
Even skilled, talented actors would have struggled to bring these cardboard characters to life, and young Strauss and Bergen were far, far from skilled and talented. To make things even worse, the woeful script gave Bergen dialogue that made her sound like a pissed off, 1970 New Yorker who just stepped off the plane in a bad mood.
At the film's start, they 'meet cute' (I'm not kidding about this) as the sole survivors of a smaller massacre of Strauss's troop by the Cheyenne.......from that point, their squabbling wanderings are often played for comedy, which forces the film's composer, Roy Budd, to jarringly switch back and forth from sprightly romance noodling to faux-Elmer Bernstein propulsive western brass.
Halfway through the film,for red-blooded guys in the audience, Nelson even stoops to putting Bergen in a cheesecake Halloween Shop Pocahontas costume.........(when Bergen and Strauss get tied up by an evil gun-runner (Donald Pleasance), the film begs for yocks by having Strauss nuzzle Bergen's ass while trying to bite through her bound wrists.....)
All this rampant stupidity comes to an end when the film finally arrives at its sole reason for being.......to regale the viewers with the spectacular grisly sights of grinning, giggling U.S. soldiers shooting, mutilating and raping Indian women and children. For anyone slow to pick up the metaphor here, there's a shot of the Cavalry stampeding over an American flag........
Since Ralph Nelson never had a moment's interest in making a realistic film about this tragic, shameful episode, he presents it like the last, showstopping dance number at the tail end of an MGM musical. He pretends to wrap himself in righteous. liberal anger.......but you realize he's no better than the lowest Drive-In Movie huckster, lopping off heads to scoop up some box-office cash.
It's a gross understatement to say this movie's aged badly. Doesn't matter how old it is......."Soldier Blue" was garbage from the moment it saw the the light of a projector bulb.
Zero stars (0).
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