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."
CONQUEST (Italy/Spain/Mexico - 1983; US release 1984)
Every few years, I feel compelled to revisit Lucio Fulci's bizarre contribution to the 1980s sword & sorcery craze, thinking "I'll figure it out this time," and I never do. There's no making sense out of CONQUEST, an acid-trippy ripoff of CONAN THE BARBARIAN by way of EL TOPO, shot in the most gauzy, foggy, smeary lens filter this side of Robert Altman's QUINTET. About as coherent as fragments of a barely-remembered dream, CONQUEST has young Ilias (Andrea Occhipinti of BOLERO) sent by his people on a quest to defeat the nefarious Ocron (Italian CONAN ripoff fixture Sabrina Siani, billed here as the more American sounding "Sabrina Sellers"), an iron-masked, topless overlord who spends most of her time writhing with snakes, eating the brains of her victims, and ordering around her army of talking wolf/dog creatures who walk upright. Ilias gets some help from mercenary warrior Mace (Jorge Rivero, during his "George Rivero" phase). who becomes his mentor in their quest to defeat Ocron, who's later joined by her own masked co-conspirator Zora (Conrado San Martin). Mace and Ilias then spend a lot of time walking around and encountering various creatures of undetermined origin before their final, fateful laser arrow showdown with the evil Ocron and her minions.
Coming soon after the end of his unstoppable 1979-1982 run of iconic gorehound classics like ZOMBIE, CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD, THE BEYOND, and others, Fulci had grown into enough of a genuine auteur by this point--even if it hadn't yet been recognized--that you can see him attempting to imbue CONQUEST with his unique stamp. Claudio Simonetti's score is mostly then-trendy synth material, but there are some cues that are strikingly similar to Fabio Frizzi's work on CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD, and it shares with it the same hazily nonsensical, anything-goes dream logic, plus Mace has a mark on his forehead that looks very similar to the "Eibon" symbol from THE BEYOND. From the laser arrows to the wolf/dog army to a drowned Mace being brought back to life by dolphins, there's no way to predict what will happen next in CONQUEST. Fulci also doesn't skimp on the trash and the gore: Siani is topless every moment she's onscreen, and there's plenty of gore, from cannibalism to scalping to one unfortunate female victim being ripped up the middle like a broken wishbone and disemboweled. His partnership with Fabrizio De Angelis over after the producer slashed the budget of 1982's MANHATTAN BABY by 75%, and his relationship with frequent screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti in tatters, Fulci is in hired gun mode on CONQUEST even with his attempts to personalize it, brought in by Italian producer Giovanni Di Clemente after the latter entered a co-production deal with Mexican producers/screenwriters Carlos Vasallo and J. Antonio de la Loma.
Mexican actor Rivero likely came as part of the Vasallo/de la Loma package deal, as he starred in several of their past and future de la Loma-directed films, like the 1982 espionage thriller TARGET: EAGLE, the 1984 DEATH WISH-meets-CONVOY trucker revenge actioner KILLING MACHINE, the 1988 DELTA FORCE ripoff COUNTERFORCE, and the 1989 bare-knuckle brawler FIST FIGHTER. Rivero attempted to break into Hollywood when he co-starred with John Wayne in 1970's RIO LOBO and with Charlton Heston and James Coburn in 1976's THE LAST HARD MEN, but he never happened in the US. Instead, Rivero built a career in Mexico and overseas in Spain, with occasional appearances in a few straight-to-US-video titles in the 1990s, like the Traci Lords thriller ICE and the 1995 MST3K staple WEREWOLF. Released in the US by United Film Distribution Company in the spring of 1984, CONQUEST has its devoted defenders but is generally considered second, if not third-tier Fulci. It's not a good movie, but there's something to it that keeps drawing me back, whether it's the splatter and surrealism inherent to Fulci or some of the humor that seems intentional, like Ocron screaming "Stop him, Zora!" as Zora just emits an exasperated sigh and vanishes into thin air as if he can't even with this bitch anymore, or the closing credits caveat "Any reference to persons or events is purely coincidental." Thanks for clearing that up. (R, 89 mins)
