Word: nelsoned
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...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...
...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...
...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...
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...
...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...