Soldier Blue (1970)

          Nineteen-seventy was a wild year for Hollywood movies about the Native American experience, even if most of the stories Hollywood generated were told through the prism of white people assimilating into Indian culture. The best of the 1970 batch is undoubtedly Little Big Man, with Dustin Hoffman, although A Man Called Horse, with Richard Harris, has noteworthy virtues, as well. And then there’s Soldier Blue, which is in odd hybrid of bleeding-heart liberalism, culture-clash comedy, gut-wrenching violence, and Vietnam allegory. The movie’s a mess, but it’s strangely compelling and undeniably memorable, if for no other reason than how well it captures the anguished spirit of the historical moment in which it was created. Based on a novel by Theodore V. Olsen (which was originally titled Arrow in the Sun), the movie is set in the American West during the Civil War and revolves around two white characters with opposing views on Indians. Thrown together by circumstance, they bicker until arriving at an understanding, only to stumble into a horrific slaughter by U.S. soldiers of an entire Cheyenne village.

          Although the film’s bloody climax is based on a real historical incident from the time of the Indian Wars—the infamous Sand Creek massacre—the filmmakers’ thematic and visual parallels to the 1968 My Lai atrocity in Vietnam are unmistakable. So, in a weird way, the Native Americans supposedly at the heart of Soldier Blue are doubly marginalized—not only are Caucasians the leading characters, Indians are used as an all-purpose metaphor representing oppressed indigenous people everywhere. Still, iffy politics are the least of Soldier Blue’s problems from a cinematic perspective, because the film wobbles between sitcom-style banter and ugly scenes of murder and rape. Nearly everything in the movie is highly watchable for some reason or another, but Soldier Blue feels like several films cobbled together into one sloppy whole.

          The picture begins when Cheyenne warriors attack a group of civilians and soldiers. Only Cresta (Candice Bergen) and Honus (Peter Strauss) survive. She’s a white woman who has been held captive by Indians for a long period of time and has unexpectedly developed sympathy for their plight, whereas he’s a straight-line military man with ignorantly racist attitudes. The duo travels through a remote wilderness, arguing their way to mutual attraction while surviving near-death experiences as well as encounters with weird frontier characters. (Reliably odd character actor Donald Pleasance plays one of these folks.) Eventually, Cresta and Honus reach a military fort, where Cresta becomes permanently disillusioned with white culture—the soldier to whom she’s engaged reveals his plans to annihilate the village where she was held.
          The heroes try to prevent mass bloodshed, to no avail, so director Ralph Nelson unleashes an incendiary barrage for the movie’s big finish—the raid on the Indian village is filled with graphic violence and intense rape scenes as nature-loving Indians fall victim to monstrous whites. All of this is exactly as heavy-handed as it sounds, even if the underlying message is historically valid. Viewed as a piece of dramatic art, Soldier Blue is a train wreck. But viewed as a window into the concerns of its time, Soldier Blue gains a measure of twisted relevance.

Solider Blue: FREAKY

The Jericho Mile (1979)

          Michael Mann didn’t just introduce himself to viewers with his first feature-length directing job. He dazzled them. Arresting, emotional, and smart from its first frame to its last, this made-for-TV drama delivers an unusual story with meticulous realism, showcasing Mann’s signature tropes of a hip visual style, deeply felt character work, and ingeniously integrated music. The picture also demonstrates why Mann is virtually peerless in his depiction of the criminal mind, because he doesn’t portray crooks as monsters—rather, he portrays them as self-aware professionals ruled by strict codes.

          Set inside a maximum-security prison, The Jericho Mile revolves around Larry Murphy (Peter Strauss), a lifer who obsessively runs “fast miles” every day in the prison courtyard. Isolated from all but a few fellow inmates, Larry lives inside himself; the exhilaration of athletic challenge give his existence meaning and structure. One afternoon, humanistic prison shrink Dr. Bill Janowski (Geoffrey Lewis) clocks Murphy and realizes how fast the man is moving, so he confers with Warden Earl Gulliver (Billy Green Bush). An innovative penologist, Gulliver realizes that nurturing Murphy’s talent might inspire other inmates to break the cycle of jailhouse profiteering and post-incarceration recidivism. Gulliver invites a nationally ranked running coach, Jerry Beloit (Ed Lauter), to observe and possibly train Murphy. After staging a race between Murphy and several professional runners, Beloit declares that Murphy has Olympic potential. Yet that’s only the surface of the story. Unfolding concurrent with Murphy’s surprising odyssey is a grim drama involving powerful inmate Dr. D (Brian Dennehy), who runs a jailhouse drug ring and gets into a hassle with Murphy, which inadvertently sparks a prison-wide racial conflict.

          Laced into all of this is a potent revelation of Murphy’s layers. We don’t learn about the nature of his original crime until we’ve already become invested in his journey, so Murphy emerges as a profoundly sympathetic character—we’re able to root for him with full awareness of what he’s done, and full awareness of his capacity for future violence. Presenting Murphy without apologies might, in fact, be the greatest accomplishment of this fine film, so it’s no surprise that Strauss took home an Emmy for his dimensional performance, or that Mann and co-writer Patrick J. Nolan shared an Emmy for the picture’s outstanding teleplay. Yet on many levels, The Jericho Mile is most impressive as a compendium of all the skills Mann had developed thus far as a writer-producer on episodic TV shows, and that he would continue to embellish in his extraordinary feature career. He uses editing and music to create vivacious rhythms; he shoots real locations and sets equally well to conjure an engrossing sense of place; and he guides actors toward naturalistic performances.

          Character players including Bush, Lauter, Lewis, and Roger E. Mosley do some of their career-best work here, imbuing their roles with lively individuality. Dennehy, still very early in his screen career, is animalistic and frightening, and Strauss achieves several moving moments by channeling a volatile combination of compassion and rage. (Strauss totally nails Mann’s trademark device of having criminals speak without contractions to avoid misunderstanding, so he seethes when delivering such lines as, “Man, I am into nothing! That is how I do my time!”) Plus, as he so often does, Mann pulls the whole movie together with an ingenious musical flourish, turning a Latin-ized version of the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” into Murphy’s searing theme song.

The Jericho Mile: RIGHT ON