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.â€
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.