CINEMA
The red and the black
CHRISTOPHER HUDSON
\ Soldier Blue (x' Lei-
cester Square Odeon) What's more, the opening massacre is a clean and military affair. The Indians don't massacre defenceless people who have pleaded for mercy; neither are they shown raping women and hacking away at bodies that are already dying, as in the harrowing final sequence, which ends with a voice-over prayerfully claiming it as an episode out of history, a genuine bit of Americana. Inevitably there are parallels with a more re- cent war, all the more disquieting because apparently coincidental. A huddle of women and children is sprayed with bullets; the col- onel himself shoots a child at close range and arrests the soldier who brings the small corpse to him in shock and grief.
If the rest of the film were strong enough to justify the moralistic impact of this con- clusion, it could be recommended unreservedly. The Cheyenne in particular (the tribe in Soldier Blue) suffered a degree of senseless persecution it would take a generation of wide-screen Technicolor films-for-the-family to expiate. But Ralph Nelson, the director, knows his box-office, and it's not in the Indian reservations. More likely it can be located somewhere near Can- dice Bergen, who decorates the part of Cresta Marybelle Lee, a beautiful girl who loves the Cheyenne after living with their Chief for two years. Given her freedom, she falls in with the patriotic Private Honus Grant of the us Cavalry (Peter Strauss), and nearly all the film is taken up with their softening, or perhaps hardening, relationship as they make the long journey towards the nearest fort. After sunsets, discussions, fights and tenderly bandaged wounds, it begins to look as though the Cheyenne are massacred to prove a point about their incompatibility; from which perspective Soldier Blue is ex- posed as just another trite, violent, rather mushy piece of clever film-making. With the exception of Donald Pleasence, frightening as a gun-runner, and Jorge Rivero's magnificent Red Indian Chief, the acting is poor; and I'm inclined to this second view.
One impressive moment in the film is when the Indians speak in tribal language, and sub-titles come up on the screen. The McMasters ('X' ABCS, Edgware Road and Fulham Road) returns us to the traditional pidgin-English : 'I no understand', or, as a follow-up, 'No, me nice girl'. This is all right, because the film is about an oppressed black ranch-owner in the bigoted South, and a pro- duction company has to get indignant about one thing at a time. It might have been a good story, but none of the characters is developed beyond a copybook attitude and the heroism and persecution are wearily predictable, as if liberalism were an artistic triumph in itself. Jack Palance as the chief lyncher parodies himself, grinning, squinting and spitting like an automaton. One sup- poses it is a hall-mark of bad direction (Alf Kjellin here) that actors should be forced back to playing out an amalgam of their previous roles.
The McKenzie Break ('AA' London Pavilion) is billed as the ultimate escape film, and I recommend the ultimate escape which is not to go in in the first place. Set in an English prisoner-of-war camp in the Highlands, it matches an alcoholic but cun- ning Irishman (as opposed to an alcoholic but stupid Irishman which is the other kind in films) against a tough, resolute German officer determined to make his escape, along with twenty other u-boat personnel. The formula has been reversed, therefore, but the style and approach are those of countless other escape films back to nineteen forty-six. Showing in the same programme is Sabata ('AA), an Italian Western in which as usual the hero killa about two hundred puppeta characters who jerk and expire hopelessly. Lee Van Cleef shoots them all so calmly you feel sure that if he were killed he would rise from the dead, which, in fact, he does.
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