SOLDIER BLUE (US - 1970) Directed by Ralph Nelson. Written by John Gay. Cast: Candice Bergen, Peter Strauss, Donald Pleasence, John Anderson, Jorge Rivero, Dana Elcar, James Hampton, Mort Mills, Bob Carraway, Martin West, Jorge Russek, Aurora Clavell. (R, 115 mins) A revisionist western inspired by the 1864 Sand Creek massacre in the Colorado Territory that also tries to be a then-topical Vietnam allegory, Ralph Nelson's SOLDIER BLUE was a controversial misfire in the summer of 1970 (though its theme song by Indigenous Canadian singer/songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie became a big hit in the UK) and despite some positive critical reassessment and an inevitable cult following over the ensuing 50 years, it hasn't really improved with age. Just out on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber (because physical media is dead), SOLDIER BLUE generated some buzz at the time of its release for its sickeningly violent climax, with a cavalry attack on a Cheyenne tribe so gory and over-the-top it that out-splatters THE WILD BUNCH and goes several steps beyond, with heads blown apart, limbs hacked off, children being decapitated, trampled, and/or impaled, a Cheyenne woman gang-raped and getting her left breast sliced off, and a laundry list of other unmentionables in a seemingly endless barrage of atrocities that remains shocking today and seems more in line with an Italian jungle exploitation grinder. That the perpetrators are American soldiers attacking "savages" is a salient point that directly invokes both Sand Creek and the 1968 My Lai Massacre in Vietnam. The finale of SOLDIER BLUE needed to be as difficult to watch as it is, certainly one of the most disturbing depictions of historical carnage ever seen in a mainstream American film, but it's such a tedious buildup in a generally standard western that the abrupt shift in tone seems like a tacked-on afterthought. Imagine if you can a pre-WILD BUNCH Hollywood western that feels like it was started by Henry Hathaway and finished by Ruggero Deodato.
A cavalry escorting military fiancee Cresta Marybelle Lee (Candice Bergen) across the Colorado Territory to her husband-to-be is attacked by the Cheyenne warriors of the feared Spotted Wolf (Jorge Rivero). The only survivors are Cresta and Private Honus Gant (Peter Strauss), who must make their way across the harsh terrain to the safety of her fiance Lt. Johnny McNair's (Bob Carraway) unit at Fort Battalion. Along the way, they brave the elements, deal with a shortage of food and water, have a run-in with Kiowa tribesmen, and encounter a duplicitous trader named Isaac Q. Cumber (Donald Pleasence), who's been getting rich by selling military weapons to various tribes. Complicating matters is that the headstrong, independent Cresta sympathizes with the "savages" and spent two years married to Spotted Wolf. Of course, she and Gant will develop feelings for one another, but there's a lot of bickering and arguing along the way, with the brash, vulgar, uninhibited Cresta and the fussy, whiny, uptight Gant turning into the stars of a mismatched "...if they don't kill each other first!" buddy movie as he expresses continued dismay at her behavior while she derisively refers to him as "Soldier Blue" for his naive, puritanical ways.
The opening attack on Gant's cavalry unit is well-choreographed and features some attention-getting Peckinpah-esque bloodletting, with a memorable shot of a bullet ripping through the cheek of Gant's clownish best friend Private Menzies (James Hampton). But the opening and closing sequences are tonally at odds with everything in the sluggish middle. Bergen and Strauss (in just his second film after his 1969 debut as Michael Douglas' younger brother in HAIL, HERO) both deliver seriously grating performances, with Bergen's especially feeling much too 1970 counterculture to work in an 1864 period setting (when John Anderson's psychopathic colonel sees Cresta and harumphs "When I see young people today behaving like that, I just can't help but wonder what this goddamn country's coming to," the point is a little too on-the-nose). Strauss' Gant is one of the least-appealing western genre heroes you'll ever see, and it's little wonder that SOLDIER BLUE began and effectively ended his career as a big-screen leading man. He next did Sergio Grieco's obscure 1971 Italian desert adventure MAN OF LEGEND before embarking on a successful TV career, vying with Richard Chamberlain for the "King of the Miniseries" title with must-see blockbusters like 1976's RICH MAN, POOR MAN and its 1978 sequel, and 1981's MASADA, along with an Emmy-winning turn in the 1979 TV-movie THE JERICHO MILE, the directing debut of Michael Mann. Strauss only made occasional appearances in feature films for the next two decades (1976's THE LAST TYCOON, 1983's SPACEHUNTER: ADVENTURES IN THE FORBIDDEN ZONE) before aging into the character actor phase of his career in the late '90s and into the '00s. Now 73, Strauss remains busy, and was most recently spotted in multiplexes in a supporting role in 2018's OPERATION FINALE and he guest-starred on a February 2020 episode of GREY'S ANATOMY.
Perhaps SOLDIER BLUE needed a more risk-taking director than Nelson, a high-end journeyman who directed Sidney Poitier and Cliff Robertson to Best Actor Oscars in 1963's LILIES OF THE FIELD and 1968's CHARLY, respectively. Nelson was a top television director in the 1950s and generally took whatever big-screen assignment came his way, whether it was the 1964 Cary Grant comedy FATHER GOOSE, the 1966 Poitier/James Garner western DUEL AT DIABLO, or the 1976 Rock Hudson sci-fi/horror outing EMBRYO. SOLDIER BLUE has some valid points to make and the comparison between Sand Creek and My Lai is a legitimate one, but it needed someone with vision to properly pull it off. Nelson was a go-to "get it in the can" director, but at a time when American cinema was at a crossroads with the New Hollywood era being ushered in by the auteurist likes of BONNIE AND CLYDE and EASY RIDER, SOLDIER BLUE struggles to find its identity. It seems to have one foot in the formulaic, old-fashioned John Wayne westerns of the past and one in the post-WILD BUNCH "Bloody Sam"-style of the present and future. As a result, it never reconciles those discrepancies and ends up working at cross purposes. It's a western with a score by Roy Budd that invokes the grandiose majesty of a composer like Dimitri Tiomkin (HIGH NOON, GIANT), but it doesn't gel with off-the-charts levels of graphic violence and gory atrocities so extreme that it's legitimately surprising that the film somehow managed to avoid an X rating. Nowhere is that inability to settle on a tone more apparent than in Pleasence's unthreatening, almost comic-relief secondary bad guy, complete with his silly name and a set of ludicrous fake teeth to make him even more buffoonish. No politically-charged Vietnam-era allegory that features gang rape, breast mutilation, realistic scalpings, copious amounts of horse-tripping, and children being decapitated, impaled, and trampled as buckets of blood splash across the screen in one stomach-turning shot after another should include a total goofball character named "Isaac Q. Cumber."
COUNSELOR AT CRIME aka THE COUNSELLOR (Spain/Italy - 1973; US release 1975) Directed by Alberto De Martino. Written by Adriano Bolzoni, Vincenzo Flamini (Vincenzo Mannino), Leonardo Martin and Alberto De Martino. Cast: Martin Balsam, Tomas Milian, Francisco Rabal, John Anderson, Dagmar Lassander, Carlo Tamberlani, Manuel Zarzo, Eduardo Fajardo, George Rigaud, Franco Angrisano, Giovanni Carbone, Fortunato Arena, Carla Mancini, Lorenzo Piani, Sacheen Littlefeather, Nello Pazzafini. (R, 102 mins) While most films in the polziotteschi subgenre of politically-charged Italian crime movies of the 1970s took place in Rome, Naples, and Sicily, COUNSELOR AT CRIME is a bit of an outlier in that it's set almost entirely in America. Journeyman director and co-writer Alberto De Martino (whose later credits included the EXORCIST ripoff THE ANTICHRIST, the OMEN ripoff HOLOCAUST 2000, and the MST3K favorite THE PUMAMAN) fashions COUNSELOR as a pretty blatant, albeit contemporary GODFATHER knockoff. Shot largely in San Francisco and Albuquerque in January and February of 1973, COUNSELOR AT CRIME (or, as it was known in Italy, IL CONSIGLIORI) hits everything on the GODFATHER checklist: Sonny-at-the-causeway-like ambushes; a treacherous, Sollozzo-like troublemaker trying to make a name for himself by eliminating a powerful Don; an unexpected sojourn to Sicily when things get too hot at home in the States; and someone is even handed the severed head of a fish, a clever way to knock two things off the checklist by combining "sleeps with the fishes" with the horse's head in the movie mogul's bed. IL CONSIGLIORI was released in Europe in the summer of 1973 but didn't make its way to the US until 1975, when low-grade exploitation outfit Joseph Green Pictures picked it up and retitled it COUNSELOR AT CRIME. It's a largely by-the-numbers gangster picture that goes out of its way to look as American as possible, spotlighting the San Francisco locations where De Martino valiantly attempts to keep the Golden Gate Bridge visible as often as possible (there's even a sequence taking place at the same exit ramp where a pimp is killed in the same year's Dirty Harry movie MAGNUM FORCE), with Riz Ortolani's score having a definite "'70s cop show" sound to it when the composer isn't straight-up borrowing a key theme from his VALACHI PAPERS score from the previous year.
A low-level, syphilitic gangster loses his shit in a bowling alley, setting in motion a chain of events that sees underboss Garofalo (played by a backup Michael Ansara toupee planted on the head of Francisco Rabal) make a ballsy power play to take over the San Francisco organization ruled by Don Antonio Magadino (Martin Balsam). Magadino's mind is elsewhere since his godson and consigliere Thomas Accardo (Tomas Milian) is being paroled after serving a stretch for jury tampering in Santa Fe State Prison in New Mexico, the same joint that houses incarcerated Boss of Bosses Don Vito Albanese (American character actor John Anderson, dubbed by Robert Spafford). Accardo is welcomed back to the organization by Don Antonio, who raised him as his own son after he was orphaned as a child (a character trait in no way influenced by Robert Duvall's Tom Hagen in THE GODFATHER), but Accardo has other plans. He continued his legal studies while in prison, and fell in love with Laura Murchison (Dagmar Lassander), a professor at the University of New Mexico. He wants to leave the Family, marry Laura, and live a normal life away from the Mafia. Don Antonio grants him his wish, despite the ironclad rule that no one leaves, which enrages Garofalo, who then plots to whack Accardo so he doesn't talk, and Don Antonio over his flagrant disregard of their sacred Mafia oath.
COUNSELOR AT CRIME offers one bit of interesting trivia that tangentially connects it to THE GODFATHER: it's one of the very few movie appearances of Native American activist Sacheen Littlefeather, best known for taking the stage at the 1973 Oscars to refuse Marlon Brando's GODFATHER Oscar for him, and seen here in a brief bit as a hooker. Beyond that, it also offers one of the most low-key performances of Milian's career, a real surprise considering his string of flamboyantly over-the-top psycho characters in Umberto Lenzi classics like ALMOST HUMAN (1974) and ROME ARMED TO THE TEETH (1976). Rabal is dubbed by the gruff Ed Mannix but definitely looks the part as the arrogant, untrustworthy Garofalo, and Balsam is a solid pro as the stern and paternal Don Antonio, and while he may not ooze the charismatic charm of Brando's Vito Corleone, it's superb casting, and De Martino even lets him take part in some action sequences and shootouts. Balsam was in the early years of a relentlessly busy decade that found the Oscar-winning actor (1965's A THOUSAND CLOWNS) alternating between supporting roles in A-list Hollywood projects (SUMMER WISHES WINTER DREAMS, THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE, MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS, ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN) and starring roles in Italian crime films (CONFESSIONS OF A POLICE CAPTAIN, CHRONICLE OF A HOMICIDE, MEET HIM AND DIE, DEATH RAGE), and his presence here definitely helps sell the idea of making it look like an American gangster movie, and he fares much better than the miscast Anderson, whose two scenes were actually shot inside Santa Fe State Prison, complete with several inmates in the chow line turning to look straight into the camera.
It's a mostly routine post-GODFATHER mob movie until a surprisingly strong finale where both Balsam and Milian really get to show some chops without saying much at all. And it's in the finale where COUNSELOR AT CRIME makes its only real attempt to branch off from THE GODFATHER with the notion that it's not the aging mob bosses who hand off the power to the next generation, but rather, it's the older generation that's still around to pick up the pieces when their dealings and grudges end up sacrificing that next, doomed generation. It's an interesting perspective that should've been explored in a more in-depth fashion by the script, which was written by De Martino with three other writers (including frequent collaborator Vincenzo Mannino) before being translated into English and reworked by an uncredited Michael V. Gazzo, the raspy-voiced playwright and sometime actor who would get an Oscar nomination for his performance as bitter mob informant Frankie Pentangeli in 1974's THE GODFATHER PART II.
