Kino Lorber
Not a great film but noteworthy in its Woodstock-era context—and for many years, a home-video rarity, on VHS only in its watered-down "PG" edited version—director Ralph Nelson's revisionist western "Soldier Blue" (from legendary producer Joe Levine) gets a Blu-ray re-release, complete with a tacked-on early warning about the ghastly violence you will witness in the climax. Derived from a novel, "Arrow in the Sun," by Theodore V. Olsen, the film riffs on the real-life Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado, showing the "winning" of the west to be a bloody, unjust matter, akin to the then-offscreen Vietnam War. The opening is a cruel Cheyenne war party killing off a contingent of Colorado cavalry, refusing a surrender offer by the whites. Two lone survivors are Honus Gent (Peter Strauss), a naively loyal and sexually timid soldier whose father was killed at Little Big Horn, and Cresta (Candice Bergen), a lissome, liberated and headstrong young woman formerly in Indian captivity; she was briefly one of the brides the Cheyenne Chief Spotted Wolf (Jorge Rivero) and remains sympathetic to the natives. The mismatched duo wanders the rugged country, Cresta trying to convince Honus that the Indians are understandably fighting to defend their existence and that the US Cavalry are the real villains, committing atrocities and breaking treaties. Bergen looks and talks (and even dresses) like an archetypal San Francisco "flower child" activist (albeit with a wilderness-survival toughness), and the two leads' banter verges into semi-comedic and even raunchy territory (in the 1860s frontier, Cresta recalls Donald Sutherland's anachronistic WWII hippie tank driver channeling the "positive waves" in "Kelly's Heroes," another 1970 entry). The finale, mirroring the opener, shows Cresta is all too correct, however, as America's mounted heroes gleefully slaughter, rape, and dismember Cheyenne women and children, a la the US Army troops at My Lai, a sequence that was designed to rival "The Wild Bunch" in its savagery while imparting a Big Message. The impact is still harrowing, despite the uneven stuff that has gone before, and naked-Indian-maiden poster art (reproduced on the disc packaging) that suggest B&D grindhouse fare. The folk-protest theme song by Buffy Saint-Marie is an asset. Extras include a commentary track by film historians Howard S. Berger and Steve Mitchell, both "Soldier Blue" advocates, defend its typical Hollywood approach that puts the dramatic spotlight on Caucasians instead of the nonwhites who are supposedly the progressive material's main concern. They point out the film's success in Europe (even in its trimmed form) and Nelson's unheralded career as a journeyman movie/TV director. According to the pair, an unexpurgated test-screen cut of "Soldier Blue" had 20 additional minutes of horrific gore and mutilation, deemed unreleasable. Even they are not eager for that one to resurface. Optional purchase. (C. Cassady)