Soldier Blue is a 1970 American revisionist Western film directed by Ralph Nelson and starring Candice Bergen, Peter Strauss, and Donald Pleasence.

She arrives at Fort Reunion, only to discover that her fiancé's cavalry unit plans to attack the peaceful Native American village of the Cheyenne the following day.

After a cavalry charge decimates the Native American men, the soldiers enter the village and begin to rape and kill the Cheyenne women.

[2] The title song, written and performed by Buffy Sainte-Marie, was released as a single and became a top ten hit in the UK as well as other countries in Europe and Japan during the summer of 1971.

[10] In September 1970, Dotson Rader writing in The New York Times, remarked that Soldier Blue "must be numbered among the most significant, the most brutal and liberating, the most honest American films ever made.

It is supposed to be a pro-Indian movie, and at the end the camera tells us the story was true, more or less, and that the Army chief of staff himself called the massacre shown in the film one of the most shameful moments in American history.

In the interests of propaganda, one might just about stomach the way the massacre itself is turned into a gleefully exploitative gore-fest of blood and amputated limbs; but not when it's associated with a desert romance that's shot like an ad-man's wet dream, all soft focus and sweet nothings.

A massive hit in Great Britain and much of the rest of the world, Soldier Blue was, in the words of its maverick director, Ralph Nelson, "not a popular success" in the United States.

The film's failure in its homeland might also have had something to do with the perception in some quarters – prompted by production company publicity material – that it was a deliberate Vietnam allegory.Retrospective analysis has placed the film in a tradition of motion pictures of the early 1970s – such as Ulzana's Raid (1972) – which were used as "natural venues for remarking on the killing of women and children by American soldiers" in light of the political conflicts of the era.

"[5] TV Guide awarded the film one out of five stars, writing: "Soldier Blue suffers from Bergen's weak performance and Strauss is bland, but the parallel between the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre and Vietnam's My Lai incident is disturbing and the film's depiction of Native American life is an explicit attempt to move past Hollywood stereotypes.

"[20] Frayling also praised its cinematography and visual elements in his 2006 book Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone: "most critics succeeded in missing the really inventive sections of Soldier Blue, which involve Nelson's use of elaborate zooms, and of untraditional compositions, both of which subtly explore the relationship between the 'initiates' and the virgin land which surrounds them.