Without exception, the characters are one-dimensional. We have a strong woman, who has seen horrors done in the name of America. Her travelling companion is a simple soldier, who thinks his country is great. Her fiance (Dana Elcar) is a captain in the army. An old colonel (John Anderson) plans a raid on a Cheyenne village and a Cheyenne warrior (Jorge Rivero) believes he can make peace with the Americans, but will be betrayed. The least said about Donald Pleasence and his comedy teeth the better. He plays a calico salesman by the name of Isaac Q. Cumber (cucumber, geddit?). Perhaps some of the musical score, or the paralels with the Vietnam war are now dated, but generally it remains a powerful film that also makes you think.

I would say that most people in our company didn't consider the Vietnamese human." – Dennis Bunning So, does anyone know if a completely uncut DVD release is in existance, or will this be one of those films that will never be seen in full, due to its history (ala "The Last House On The Left"), and bad storage of one copy of the original uncensored negative?

VERY 1980's

I recently taped and watched the BBC2 screening of "Soldier Blue" - a graphic and uncompromising Western movie from 1971, starring Peter Strauss and Candace Bergen. In the BBC's defence, though, it was a good clean print, and was almost in the right ratio, as far as I could tell. (The film appears to start in a hard-masked 2.35:1 ratio, before pulling out to its proper ratio of 1.85:1, which is what the BBC version did as well.)

Shaun - it's the final 20 minutes of the movie, that give the film its "18" certificate, and also the problems with censorship in most parts of the world. (Even the US still doesn't have an uncut version legally available!) On paper, the story looked more like an old-school western, 'cowboys and indians'. In fact, Soldier Blue is an early revisionist western, told more from the Native American side as well as the anti-war movement. Like Little Big Man, this film was part of the learning process that challenged the demonisation of ‘injuns’ in countless cowboy movies. It's almost fifty years later now and we have seen more violence than they even thought of showing in Soldier Blue. We have read the Pentagon Papers and watched Dances with Wolves. The film "Soldier Blue" aired on BBC2, late at night on Friday 16th August, between 00:20 and 02:15 hours. The timeslot was kind of understandable, bearing in mind the ending, and the nature of the film itself. at the close of Soldier Blue. Indeed, the details are so alike – right down to a massacre in a ditch –

Curious to know what the movie's about? Here's the plot: "After a cavalry group is massacred by the Cheyenne, only two survivors remain: Honus, a naive private devoted to his duty, and Cresta, a young woman who had lived with the Cheyenne two years and whose sympathies lie more with them than with the US government. Together, they must try to reach the cavalry's main base camp. As they travel onward, Honus is torn between his growing affection for Cresta."