Soldier Blue

I cannot describe the impact that this film had on me. The warmth of the relationship that slowly develops between Honus and Cresta leaves you totally unprepared for the violence of the attack on the Cheyenne village and the scene hits you like a ton of bricks. I saw this film (in Europe) with my ex-wife and none of us could speak a word until we arrived back home, some 30 minutes after the film ended. An interesting variation to "How the West was Won" that I will never forget,

I still remember seeing this in the cinema at barely legal age. It profoundly affected me. From what starts as an ordinary western, ends in scenes so shocking it left me dumbfounded. But this really was how the west was won - in blood and slaughter. For me this was an awakening to the power of cinema in general and its power to both shock, educate, entertain and bewilder. This is not a film you will forget easily. Fifty years later it still resonates.

After a paymaster cavalry unit is slaughtered by the Cheyenne in 1877, a surviving soldier and Indian sympathizer team-up to get back to the nearest fort (Peter Strauss and Candice Bergen). The young man struggles with contempt for what he considers a treasonous attitude along with his growing affection for the brash woman. Then he sees the awful truth firsthand.

"Soldier Blue" (1970) is an entertaining, but odd Western. At heart, it's a fun romance between a patriotic military man and a profane "free-spirit" who is able to survive the challenges of the American wilderness precisely because she has shed Victorian inanities. This is bookended by a Cheyenne-led massacre on a non-threatening cavalry group and the military massacre of a peaceful Cheyenne camp, filled with women and children. The latter is obviously based on the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864.

I respect that the movie shows how massacres happened on both sides, but it stacks the deck against the Caucasian militants by showing them butchering women & children and not vice versa.

The opening Indian attack ensures that the viewer's sympathies are with Honus (Strauss, the eponymous 'Soldier Blue'), so you travel the same journey as him: At first, regarding the Indians as bloodthirsty savages who have no qualms about committing mass murder and abusing corpses if it'll help them acquire firearms but, ultimately, ending up with the revelation that Honus' 'tribe' can be just as barbaric when fitting, and even more so.

Barbaric attacks applied to both uncivilized First Americans and more civilized New Americans, but more so with the former, which is documented. Since the 1960s-70s there has been an overemphasis on the injustices committed by the US military or militants/settlers and we get a handful of examples: Wounded Knee, Bear River and Sand Creek (the latter being what this is loosely based on). Yet we never hear the other side of what provoked these events, including the atrocities that First Americans committed against New Americans. We never hear of the Dakota "War" of 1862 where Santee Sioux went on the warpath murdering between 600-800 settlers, which constituted the largest death toll inflicted upon American civilians by an enemy force until 9/11 (civilians, not soldiers); The Ward Massacre; The Nez Perce uprising, which killed dozens of settlers in Idaho and Wyoming; and the Massacre at Fort Mims. We never hear of the countless innocent settlers (not soldiers) who were murdered by bands of young "warriors": While a chief was signing a peace treaty on the tribe's behalf, they were out robbing, raping and murdering.

In short, it's easy to be pro-AmerIndian sitting on the comfort of your sofa, but not so much when you & your loved ones are threatened with gross torture, rape and slaughter in the wilderness.

The Euro-settlers wanted the land and resources while the AmerIndians craved the valuable technology of the New Americans. Both sides used treaties for peaceable relations while still trying to get what they desired when war was too costly. Both opted for combat when deemed necessary.

I should add that the real military leader who ordered the attack on the Sand Creek camp in southeast colorado, John Chivington, wasn't even an Army officer, but rather a self-appointed head of militia in the Colorado Territory during the Civil War when most capable men were away fighting for the Union in the East (remember, the real Sand Creek Massacre happened during the Civil War, not in 1877). The atrocity Chivington & his men committed at Sand Creek was separate from the US Army and not typical of government policy. In the immediate aftermath, Captain Silas Soule, an officer of the First Colorado Cavalry, condemned it as an unjust and savage massacre executed on a peaceful camp.

I'm part Abenaki and love American Indian culture, but the Leftist whitewashing of Indian atrocities and the corresponding revisionist history is deceitful and unbalanced. "Soldier Blue" is guilty of this to a degree, but features enough balance to make it worthwhile (as opposed to the grossly dishonest "Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here" from 9-10 months earlier). It's entertaining and offers equilibrium concerning the Indian Wars even though its sympathies tend to be with the First Americans.

The film runs 1 hour, 52 minutes, and was shot in Chihuahua and Sonora in northwest Mexico.

GRADE: B.

Without question, in its unedited form, SOLDIER BLUE is one of the most upsetting and violent films of all times, perhaps even THE most violent. This remains so, even though the film was released way back in 1970. And up until late 2006, you could only see an uncut version of this film via imports. Lionsgate Video, however, has rectified this.

Basically a fictional re-enactment of the infamous 1864 Sand Creek massacre in Colorado by the U.S. Cavalry on a Cheyenne Indian village and the events that lead up to it, but actually based on Theodore V. 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. Eventually, of course, they start to fall in love. This gives a story that otherwise might be interpreted as an arguably pretentious attempt to link the Cavalry's atrocities of the past to the modern Army's behavior in Vietnam a certain amount of emotional validity. 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. In fact, when the film was re-released in 1974, much of that bloodshed was chopped off so the film could somehow get a 'PG' rating; it is that version that American viewers have had to put up with on video until late 2006. 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. It may not be a masterpiece, the way THE WILD BUNCH or SAVING PRIVATE RYAN were (and they too were incredibly ferocious in terms of violence). But it's good that SOLDIER BLUE has finally made it to DVD in its original uncut form so that people can now judge its validity in whole, regardless of its politics or, even more, its enormously graphic finale. It is a film that HAS to be seen today.

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. Extremely graphic, shocking and disturbing!!! 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..!