FilmsCowboys and Vietnamese

REMEMBER when Indians didn't bleed? Remember when they simply swept down out of the hills, swirled madly about the besieged white men, and then fled wildly, howling like frightened, furious children, when the cavalry arrived for a nick-of-time rescue? Those were the days when Indians were really serviceable. No worry about characterization, no need for realistic detail or historical recreation. Just trot them out on stage and as quickly do them in. Those were the days when Indians died by simply biting the dust. No questions asked. No catharsis. Cut.

Ralph Nelson's Soldier Blue is one of the new breed of films that no longer treats its Indians so crudely. The Indians in Soldier Blue are real flesh-and-blood. Though mostly blood. Soldier Blue advertises itself as the "most savage film ever made!" It is rated R.

Though you're never quite sure in what way it means to be "savage." It does contain some of the most gruesome simulation of violence done to living human flesh that I've ever seen on film. It does pretend to a self-serving sense of moral outrage that the violence it recreates should ever have occurred. Indians, supposedly treated sympathetically, do figure in its plot. And yet, I would like to think, that in admitting their film savage, the makers of Soldier Blue are compulsively confessing to the calculated barbarism that infects the whole wretched picture.

SOLDIEER BLUE is just another Hollywood whore, trying to redeem itself by faking a socially-conscious heart of gold. The film opens with a Chevenne attack on a U.S. Cavalry paymaster's detail and closes with a Cavalry attack on a peaceful and defenseless Chevenne village. But it is only tangentially concerned with such affairs. The bulk of the film is given over to a kind of Western Love Story in which a hard-as-nails white woman wanders about, and eventually falls in love, with a rather silly young soldier. Candice Bergen plays the foul-mouthed girl on her way to join her fiance, an army officer stationed at Fort Reunion (clever, no?); she has been held captive for two years by the neighborhood Indians and, at film's beginning, has just somehow, inexplicably been freed-though whether rescued from, returned or simply lost by her Indian captors one never learns. She is once again setting out to make it to the fort. She is unlucky enough to book passage on the ill-fated paymaster's detail, and, no sooner are the credits over, than the Indians have wiped out the unit, overlooking only Candice and a thoroughly confused young private (Peter Strauss), whom Candice quickly derides as "Soldier Blue," her way of saying "preppie snob."

And Soldier Blue, or Honus as we come to know and love him, is certainly easily made jest of. Not only does he recite "The Charge of the Light Brigade" as he lingers tearfully over the bodies of his dead buddies, he also spends a good deal of the film trying to keep his socks dry. No wonder that he grimaces so at the sight of Miss Bergen's "tantalizing" body. Taking in the whole sordid scene with a knowing glance, Candice quickly browbeats Honus into submission, realizing, as Soldier Blue winces at the sound of her every four-letter word, that it's up to her-superior being that she is, both because she's a woman and because she's slept with the Injuns-to get the two of them back to camp. What follows is often quite funny. Not genuinely funny, perhaps, but certainly inadvertently so.

Together, the two look completely out of place, utterly bewildered in their environment. We accept them neither as actors nor as nineteenth-century Westerners. Instead, they turn the conventions of the Western into a series of burlesque gags. Candice spends half her time trying to seduce the virginal Strauss-she delightedly rips off piece after piece of her disintegrating dress before eventually changing into a Raquel Welch 2000 Years B.C. wash cloth-only to resist the eager lad when he finally gets it up by demurring with a sincere, "Honus, tell me, do you really mean it?" Hell, lady, you don't go around shoving your boobs in the poor kid's face and then start preaching situation ethics!

BUT TO LET the film carry on at that level would be to risk irrelevance, and so, in its last reel, Soldier Blue goes liberal on us. Candice and her friend eventually make it to the fort, where everyone is poised to attack the Cheyenne village where Candice had been holing up for the past two years. Both Bergen and Strauss are incapable of halting the madness. The film turns into a bloodbath as a crazy, half-drunken major directs the inevitable massacre. Not only do his men slaughter the village chief when he approaches them with an American flag and treaty papers, but they also rape every woman and dismember every child in sight. And the audience is spared not a clot of all the blood. There is even one low-angle shot in which we see a woman's decapitated head fly towards us until it engulfs the entire screen. (This film, you'll recall, has been rated R.)

The spectacle pretends to justify itself, of course. Throughout the massacre, dumb, stupid Honus wanders in a daze, finally coming to recognize the criminality of American imperialism and the unchecked evil that is the Army to which he has pledged his loyalty. The sequence ends with Honus vomiting in disgust, while, for some unfathomable reason, the focus blurs to spare us this ultimate indignity.

But are the Indians any the better for it all? Isn't Soldier Blue equally as racist as any other two-bit Western we've ever seen? Does the blood make any difference? Does Ralph Nelson express any concern or feeling for the bodies his soldiers mutilate in such glorious, wide-screen technicolor?

Why in the first place must a film about outrages committed against the Indians be told through the eyes of a fatuous white soldier who spends more time losing his virginity than coming to political consciousness? But then the answer is obvious. As Hollywood understands it, who would pay to see a film about Indians if it didn't have at least one white star and if it didn't tell its story through a comprehensible white racist intelligence? Can any of us even imagine what a film dictated by an Indian's perceptions would be like? A Man Called Horse has made the most honest of recent attempts to break through the problem. It threw Richard Harris into the midst of an Indian village where the Indians spoke their own language-without translation or subtitles-and performed their own customs and rituals. Yet, for a twentieth-century white audience, what resulted was at best incomprehensible, at worst comic and condescending. (Like the absurdity of Dame Judith Anderson playing a wizened old Indian shrew.) Perhaps the Indians were better off in those days when they simply bit the dust. It certainly was less painful for them.

JUST AS 1970 was the year of student films, 1971 promises to be the year of Indian sagas. (And not surprisingly, the same liberal obtuseness shines through both. Consider Stuart Hagmann's Strawberry Statement. It has more in common with Soldier Blue than the rousing Buffy Sainte-Marie theme songs that are sung over the opening credits of each. For Strawberry Statement worked on the similar assumption that the only way an American audience would sit through a sympathetic treatment of student radicalism was to present the narrative through the eyes of a likeable, essentially apolitical adolescent.) Liberals take these all as hopeful signs. They fail to see that by not positing solutions, these films simply add to our problems, Ralph Nelson made it big with Lilies of the Fields, in which he blithely suggested that men of good will, black and white, could easily cooperate with little more than the aid of a song and a prayer. Such, an analysis was naive, but entirely understandable in terms of liberal response to the civil rights movement of the fifties. And, in its blind way, it was hopeful. But Soldier Blue throws the problem of the Indian back into the last century. It is nothing but defeatist. Its only purpose is to assuage liberal guilt.

Why must every film that champions the Indian's cause end in his massacre? It's as if one could simply escape it all by admitting yes, we killed them, damn shame, unforgivable, but we're sorry nonetheless. Fade out. End of problem. And yet a few Indians do still exist in America, and even now they are making unheeded demands on this society. Why not concern ourselves with their reality? Why not a documentary on the appalling conditions found on government reservations? Or better yet, a film about the growing numbers of young Indian militants, like those that have taken over Alcatraz? Why must we settle for Candice Bergen and Peter Strauss?

ONE BEGINS to suspect that Ralph Nelson's interest lies not in the Indian at all. The Indian is just a fashionable gimmick. Nelson's out there determined to make a film; whatever fads the current climate demands he caters to. But in the process of raking over past history, he seems hardly to have faced up to a number of equally serious ethical problems his own film raises.

For example, Soldier Blue made ample use of amputees, many children, to reproduce the results of a bloody massacre. Isn't there something chilling-not to say inhuman-in having a child reenact the loss of a limb? It made for a great press of course. All the national weeklies ran off descriptions of how the mild-mannered creator of Lilies was out to make the most brutal film of the year. And all in the name of artistic integrity. No one bothered to question this senseless escalation of violence on the screen. Say Fred, did you see how Nichols got that guy's guts to spill out in Catch-22? D'ya think you can improve on that?

Similar is the callousness with which Nelson treats the Indians he uses on screen. In the rape scenes, he gives us a lot of frontal nudity (which only became permissible in R films last year), all of it exploiting Indian women. When Candice gets around to her long-promised sex scene, the director discreetly cuts away. I suppose he might try to defend himself on grounds of realism-Miss Bergen's orgasms hardly being central to his theme-but the whole ploy screams of double standards.

Or take the actor that Nelson hired to play the Cheyenne chief who falls in love with Candice. Not only does the script demand that the chief treat Miss Bergen as if he were a knight out of courtly romance (when he discovers Candice has given his love beads to Honus, he nobly frees her to find happiness with her white lover), but he's not even acted by an Indian. Instead, he's a muscle-bound Mediterranean with an obviously Italian name. Now, the point isn't that an Italian can't play such a wooden Indian. It's that if Nelson were so godalmighty concerned about the Indian's plight, he might have tried to make as many opportunities available to Indians actors as possible. Seemingly, though, liberalism doesn't begin at home.

HOWEVER, it is in flaunting history and historical truth that Nelson is most outrageous. Soldier Blue is obviously saturated with references to Vietnam. The massacre even includes a My Lai type round-up and murder of the village mothers and children. When the mad major applauds his troops at film's end, he tells them they have made the West "a more decent place to live in." Nelson throws caricatures of imperialism and racism at us. We are expected to fill in the blanks. He's using our disgust with the Vietnam War to sell his film, and he's using the images in his film to reassure us of our righteousness.

And, perhaps it's a measure of our frustration and self-hatred at being powerless to end the war, that last Friday night's audience at the Harvard Square Theatre, sitting there in their two-fifty seats and wasting away three or four useless hours, grabbed at the bait. A couple of the more astute even yelling out, "America is doing that in Vietnam!" during Nelson's specially effected massacre.

Now I know nothing about the Indian wars. Atrocities like the one simulated in the film did occur-to an extent we probably can't even begin to imagine-but I doubt that the rationalizations offered at the time were as simple as those presented in the film. That isn't to say that the murders can be in any way excused. But it is to insist that if we are going to do battle with this godforsaken country it's not enough to work up a counter-image of the Establishment's lies. It's not enough to equate Indian massacres with Vietnamese atrocities. Both are appalling-and if we were fully conscious of their reality, we wouldn't content ourselves with cheering our own self-righteousness in a movie theatre-but each must be confronted on its own, complex terms. Richard Nixon uses cheap arguments by historical analogy to justify his crimes. If we are to resist them, we have to avoid the temptation of answering in kind.

I DECIDED to write this "review" not because a specific film needed criticizing-in any event it's already shuttled out of the Square and you've, luckily, lost your chance to see it-but because we all face the terrible danger of deceiving ourselves. Sure, I'd like to see an end to shoddy, manipulative trash like Soldier Blue, but, as an individual, I see no way of combating it. In which case, I think it much more important that I don't give in to the easy comforts it holds out.

The revolution is never going to be won during the course of a double-feature in a Cambridge movie house. To a large extent, my presence there means that, for me, the revolution never will be won at all. But at least I can claim for myself the partial victory that lies in honesty. I can refuse to applaud Soldier Blue and, by so doing, refuse to applaud my impotent understanding of the need for revolution. For the killing doesn't stop with Nelson's final reel. It continues and it would be criminal for me to pretend otherwise. I may not be able to end the murder in this world, but at least I can force myself to recognize its ongoing existence. Applauding Nelson's film only permits me to pretend that the battle has been won.

Towards the end of Soldier Blue, Honus, having survived the dry heaves, is being led away to a court martial for insubordination, Candice is throwing her lot in with the handful of remaining Indians, and a narrative voice-over is carrying on about a government investigation that declared the whole incident an outrage. (Again, shades of My Lai. That the government could find fault with specific acts that its own policies are calculated to support is the real outrage.) Honus and Candice smile sweetly at each other. You can just sense their Inner Peace. Honus fingers the love beads. Candice brushes her hair out of her eyes.

You almost expect them to flash self-satisfied peace signs at each other. And if they had, I'm convinced that last Friday's audience would have responded in turn. How do you separate such moral smugness from that of Richard Nixon? Wouldn't it have been more honest if we had all left that theatre with marks of our own damnation on our brows? For, by sitting through and by applauding Soldier Blue we once again demonstrate our complicity in the horror. We are still then part of the problem.