RETRO ACTIVE: THE BEST FROM CINEMA RETRO'S ARCHIVE
P.B. HURST, AUTHOR OF THE NEW BOOK THE MOST SAVAGE FILM: SOLDIER BLUE, CINEMATIC VIOLENCE AND THE HORRORS OF WAR (McFarland) LOOKS BACK AT WHAT IS PERHAPS THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL WESTERN OF ALL TIME.
A good
number of critics in 1970 believed that Soldier Blue had set a new mark
in cinematic violence, as a result of its graphic scenes of Cheyenne women and
children being slaughtered, and had thus lived up – or down – to its U.S.
poster boast that it was “The Most Savage Film in History.”
A massive
hit in Great Britain and
much of the rest of the world, Soldier Blue was, in the words of its
maverick director, Ralph Nelson, “not a popular success” in the United States. This probably had less to do with the
picture’s groundbreaking violence, and more to do with the fact that it was the
U.S. Cavalry who were breaking new ground.
For Nelson’s portrayal of the boys in blue as blood crazed
maniacs, who blow children’s brains out and behead women, shattered for ever
one of America’s most enduring movie myths – that of the cavalry as good guys
riding to the rescue – and rendered Soldier Blue one of the most radical
films in the history of American cinema.
The film’s failure in its homeland might also have had something to do
with the perception in some quarters – prompted by production company publicity
material – that it was a deliberate Vietnam allegory.
I was
unaware of most of this in 1971 when, as a nervous fifteen-year-old English
schoolboy, I read about the film’s horrors in newspapers, and heard lurid
accounts of the cutting off of breasts from my classmates, who had illegally
seen the film at a cinema that wasn’t too bothered about the age of the patrons
(all of whom should have been at least eighteen to view what was then an X
certificate film).
I had
managed to survive several Hammer horrors – Scars of Dracula, Lust
for a Vampire and Countess Dracula spring readily to mind – at the
very same cinema when I was underage. But
having been scared witless by the mutilation scene in Hush, Hush Sweet
Charlotte, when that gripping movie had played on TV several months
earlier, I wisely realised that any of the various cuts inflicted on the
Indians by the cavalry in Soldier Blue represented a mutilation too far
in terms of my well being. So I waited
for the picture to turn up on television (as it takes considerably more guts to
walk out of a packed cinema than to hide behind the sofa!). Waited and waited as it turned out.
I eventually
viewed the picture, which stars Candice Bergen, Peter Strauss and Donald Pleasence, when ITV
transmitted it in 1980. However, there
was a small problem: the notorious massacre sequence, which is the picture’s
reason for being, had been removed virtually in its entirety (seemingly more
cuts had been inflicted on the film than had been perpetrated on the American
Indians!), as it was deemed too horrific for television. (It took another twenty-two years for the
film to be shown on British terrestrial television in something resembling its
theatrical release form!) So I still
hadn’t viewed the notorious scenes that had sparked, in conjunction with films
such as The Devils, Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange, the
screen violence inferno that engulfed Britain in the 1970s.
When I
caught up with Soldier Blue on home video, I was disappointed. Although much of the material excised for the
television showing was present, the infamous rape and mutilation scene was
still absent (because of the British Board of Film Classification’s dislike of
the mixing of sex and violence). The
renowned decapitation of the Cheyenne
woman had also been trimmed (which considerably lessened its impact), and the
film was in an awful full screen format that cut off the action at the
edges. To increase my frustration, Soldier
Blue had long since ceased to be shown in cinemas, and I could find nothing
of substance about the movie in print.
My
fascination with Soldier Blue had originally been confined to the red
stuff. (The film “has a gore-count worthy of Cannibal Holocaust,”
Kevin Maher wrote in Uncut in 2005.) However, as I began to research the picture,
I became just as intrigued by the uncanny resemblance between the massacre of
hundreds of Vietnamese civilians, by American troops, at My Lai and the
extermination of the Cheyennes
at the close of Soldier Blue.
Indeed, the details are so alike – right down to a massacre in a ditch –
that some critics at the time of the film’s release seemed to believe that the
picture might have been altered to exploit the revelation of My
Lai. One of my aims from
the outset, therefore, was to discover whether Ralph Nelson had deliberately
copied the real life atrocity – something the director had always denied.
Thanks to
the wonders of the Internet, I discovered that Nelson had deposited the Soldier
Blue production files at the University
of California, Los Angeles.
An 11,000-mile round trip from London to Los Angeles followed,
plus talks with individuals (including screenwriter John Gay) connected with
the production. Many hours were also
spent in the British Film Institute, the National Newspaper Library and the
British Board of Film Classification.
My book, The Most Savage Film: Soldier Blue, Cinematic
Violence and the Horrors of War, is the result. It contains a considerable amount of material
never before published (including photographs), and includes in-depth looks at
T.V. Olsen, Ralph Nelson and John Gay, the three men primarily responsible for Soldier
Blue’s existence.
In some
respects, Soldier Blue’s increased visibility of late – due to its
release on DVD and airings on British television – has only added to the
confusion surrounding the film. Movie
Web site chatrooms debate whether various versions really are uncut; whether a scene of an elderly Indian being strung upside
down and castrated, and another of an Indian woman cut in half ever existed, or
whether they are figments of an imagination; whether an horrific image, in a book from the
1970s, of a bluecoat soldier holding up the Cheyenne chief’s severed head, was
posed especially for the stills camera, or whether it forms, along with the
aforementioned horrors, some mysterious, longer version.
When
beginning my excavations of Soldier Blue, I had never imagined the many
fascinating finds I would make. In
addition to solving the longstanding mystery of whether Ralph Nelson’s
“commentary on war” deliberately echoed the My Lai
massacre, The Most Savage Film:
- Details the bizarre,
incident-packed Mexican location shoot
- Reveals the “near-riot” at a New Jersey preview
- Exposes shocking scenes
discarded by the producers
- Outlines cuts demanded by
censors in the U.S., Britain and Australia
- Examines the cinema trailer
blunder that sparked the screen violence debate in Britain
In September,
1970, Dotson Rader opined, in The New York Times, that Soldier Blue
“must be numbered among the most significant, the most brutal and
liberating, the most honest American films ever made.” I hope that my book does justice to – in
Rader’s words – “a movie of great art and courage,” a movie that, for a variety
of reasons, has been ignored for far too long.
CLICK HERE TO PRE-ORDER THIS BOOK FROM AMAZON
CLICK HERE TO ORDER THE DVD FROM THE CINEMA RETRO AMAZON STORE
CLICK HERE TO ORDER THE DVD FROM AMAZON U.K.
