Soldier Blue

Soldier Blue (1970) is an American western directed by Ralph Nelson — watch it online on iFILM. Candice Bergen and Peter Strauss star in a film that landed in cinemas at the height of the Vietnam War protests and immediately split audiences and censors alike.

A cavalry escort is ambushed and wiped out. Two people walk away: Honus Grant, a young private whose whole identity is bound up in following orders, and Cresta Lee, a white woman who spent two years living with the Cheyenne and no longer sees the frontier conflict in clean blue-and-red terms. To reach the nearest fort they have to travel together. They share almost nothing except the road.

The screenplay is based on Theodore V. Olsen's novel Arrow in the Sun, drawing on the November 1864 attack by U.S. troops on a peaceful Cheyenne encampment at Sand Creek, Colorado. Nelson made the violence of the final act explicit as a deliberate provocation — the film was banned or cut in several countries on release. It remains one of the earliest Hollywood westerns to frame the conquest of the West from the perspective of those being conquered. Watch Soldier Blue (1970) online on iFILM.