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It was written by John Gay based on the novel Arrow in the Sun by Theodore V. Olsen. It starred Candice Bergen, Peter Strauss, and Donald Pleasence. The title song was peformed by Buffy Sainte-Marie.
The movie was controversial at the time not only for its subject matter as a revisionist western, but for its nearly unprecedented graphic depiction of violence.
Released during the height of the Vietnam War against the backdrop of the courts martial stemming from the My Lai incident, it provided the first motion picture account of one of the most infamous incidents in the history of the American frontier, in which United States cavalry troops massacred an undefended village of Cheyenne and Arapaho on the Colorado eastern plains.
Nelson, who also appeared in the movie in a minor role, pushed the depiction of the violence to explicit levels, showing nudity during rape scenes, as well as "realistic" close-up shots of bullets ripping into flesh in a manner that anticipated later directors such as Quentin Tarantino.
The account of the massacre is fictionalized in the context of a longer story involving the escape of white survivors from an earlier massacre of cavalry troops by Indians.
Avco Embassy Pictures, 1970
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