SOLDIER BLUE
US, 1970, 113 minutes, Colour.
Candice Bergen, Peter Strauss, Donald Pleasence.
Directed by Ralph Nelson.
Soldier Blue was one of a number of films that came out of America in 1970 in its new awareness of the humanity of the American Indians. The best of these films by far was Arthur Penn's Little Big Man. Carol Reed made the average The Last Warrior, Abraham Polonsky showed the Indians morally and physically in Tell Them Willie Boy is Here. Previous attempts to show something of the Indians as human beings included Man of Bronze (1951) about the Olympic champion, Jim Thorpe. In 1962, Tony Curtis gave a fine performance as Ira Hayes, one of the men who held the flag on Iwo Jima, in The Outsider. Eliot Silverste1n looked at Indian life and customs, also in 1970, in A Man Called Horse.
Soldier Blue is an obvious message film and uses as its setting an attack on a Cheyenne village and its massacre in 1864. However, the bulk of the film is a series of comic adventures of a private and Cresta Lee, a girl who has spent two years with the Cheyenne. These adventures link two massacres at beginning and end, the first of whites, the second of Indians. These both are shown in graphic detail to convince us that In the West Cowboys and Indians was not a game.
Candice Bergen is very lively as the tough Cresta; Peter Strauss looks foolish at times (even often) as the naive soldier blue. Donald Pleasence looks in with the mad villainy he showed in will Penny, a role in which we have become accustomed to see him.
Ralph Nelson wanted to make a message film and makes little attempt to disguise it. But it treats of one of those areas of history which is fact and will, for a long time, give many texts for sermons.
1. Why was this film made?
2. How much of it was sheer entertainment?
3. How much of it was 'message' - note the introductory words about noble achievements and about human history in blood as well as the final comments on the historical incidents on which the film was based.
4. What conventional Western elements were incorporated into the opening of the film - scenery, music, the pay-roll wagon, even the Cheyenne attack?
5. What were we meant to think of the attack on the pay-roll wagon? whose side were we meant to be on: white or Indian?
6. What was the point of dwelling on the incident and showing the wounds and blood so vividly? Do you think it showed why the army would seek vengeance on the Cheyenne?
7. Did you like Cresta - how had her too years with, the Cheyenne affected her? Was she a strong character - her resourcefulness, common sense, tough language? How had she become hardened?
8. Was the private a typical soldier? Note how he was contrasted with his friend ogling Cresta at the opening: was he too prim and proper, prudish? Was he inept and impractical?
9. Why was so much of the film taken up with their trying to get back to the fort?
10. What was the point of the incident with the gun-runner? What were the moral values of these gun-runners to the Indians?
11. Why did the commanding officer want to attack the Indian camp? Did he have any legal grounds for the attack? What was his personal attitude towards the Indians?
12. Did the film show enough of Indian life to make an impression on you that they were equal human beings with the white men? How did Cresta's being among them help this impression?
13. How did the attack on the camp, after the ignoring of the white flag affect you - were the soldiers war-crazed? Why did they try to rape the women and kill them?
14. At the beginning the private wept and recited Tennyson for his own dead. At the end he wept for and was arrested for the Indians. Why had he changed?
15. What impression do you think this film would make on Americans? Other audiences?
16. Do you think it was a significant contribution to the race question?
