Absolutely brilliant

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

For the first two thirds of the running time, this is an unremarkable love story-cum-western, interspersed with some rather bloody scenes of action and death which are rather surprising for the time in which this film was released. The drama is slow-paced and takes a rather long time to unfold; most of the running time is taken up with characterisation between the two central protagonists. The first is Cresta, a woman (but definitely not a lady) with bad habits, a foul tongue, and a love of the Native American Indians, which is not shared by her companion, a young, jingoistic soldier by the name of Honus Gent. The two young actors taking the lead roles, Candice Bergen and Peter Strauss, put in strong roles and in part make the viewing experience worthwhile.Although the pacing is slow, the script is witty and offers some nice wordplay between the two leads as their initial hostility turns to friendship and eventually something more. Plus, Ralph Nelson makes great use of the untamed American landscape, which is nicely shot, and there's another oddball character performance from Donald Pleasence playing a gun trader. Then all of a sudden, the film's unforgettable climax changes track as it depicts the wholesale slaughter of an Indian village by the American troops; suddenly it becomes deadly serious and often hard to watch. The gore effects are horrific and in-your-face and at this point, the true carnage and bloodshed of warfare is portrayed with guts, unlike anything ever seen before by the viewing public at the time of release. Since then, advances in special effects have resulted in far gorier films, but few share the disturbing realism of this movie's climax, which itself is based on the true story of the Sand Creek Massacre by Colorado soldiers led by one Colonel Chivington. Not a great movie, but perhaps one to remember, and a story with a moral is always one worth watching.

I was told about this film at an early age. But do not think I saw it when I was younger. But saw it a year ago and I spent quite taken by the end. I had to find out everything about this film. Backgrunds story is something I can recommend that people read about before. Both the historical event but also about the film and how important it is for movies.When I was younger I did not like the cowboy movies directly and I will not be one today. (There are exceptions). This movie showed me that the reality actually was back then. It tries to be funny but fail but succeed because it's so bad good.It's more a just a brutal history. Something as important as all other families of people have done, and continue generating do accept walk.I love when I get to see this kind of movie that inspired me and makes me want to find out more, which makes me want to learn more, know more.Think this is a must for all those who love the movie whether you like cowboy movies or not. It is much more a it. It is a masterpiece. But because of their B-film sensation will unfortunately not the large mass of people put an eye on this movie.The last part of the movie. So I thought that it could be started. I want to see more of what happened after the. There are good documentary about this particular incident. There I find very awful things that could be done film.But instead, they talk about a strong woman who wants to help people. Think they'd shown it continue the story of what happened after.

This controversial Western was the first to portray white men as savages and Indians as peaceful. Bergen is lovely and effective as a white woman sympathetic to the Indians. Strauss is such an unbelievable wimp that he whines that Bergen is showing too much skin and gets freaked out when she snuggles up to him to keep warm. With most of the film playing like a romantic comedy, the shift to repellent violence in the last act is jarring. The previous year, "The Wild Bunch" had raised the bar on screen violence, but this film takes it to another level in depicting the massacre of women and children by the cavalry, a scene where everything is ridiculously exaggerated to make the point about white man's savagery.

While riding through the Cheyenne territory transporting a safe to Fort Reunion and protecting the white woman Cresta Marybelle Lee (Candice Bergen), who had lived in a Cheyenne village for two years and sympathize with them, the twenty-two men of the cavalry are attacked by the Indians. Only Cresta and the naive, idealistic and clumsy private Honus Gent (Peter Strauss) survive, and together they walk to Fort Reunion, where Cresta is supposed to meet her fiancé Lieutenant McNair (Bob Carraway). Along their journey, Honus protects Cresta against Kiowa Indians, destroys the shipment of a trader of weapons and falls in love for Cresta, but he does not believe in Cresta words that the Cheyenne village is peaceful. When the cavalry attacks, he witnesses the hideous massacre of five hundred peaceful Cheyenne, more than half composed of women and children, and realizes that Cresta was telling the truth.In 1970, I was in my first year of high-school, and my classmates and I went at least three times to the movie theater to see this fictional story based on one of the most hideous crimes of North America history, the Sand Creek Massacre on 24 November 1864, in this awesome and controversial motion picture. This movie rewrote the Western genre, in a period of Vietnam War, "peace and love" and "Billy Jack", and for the first time the Indians were disclosed as human beings and owners of a land invaded by the "white men". Further, the director Ralph Nelson does not spare the savage action of the cavalry, depicting the rapes, scalps, decapitations, mutilations and shots with gore in very graphic and impressive images. In that occasion, I felt in love for gorgeous Candice Bergen and her natural beauty in the best role of her brilliant career. At least in Brazil, this movie has never been released on DVD; I own a very rare VHS in my collection, released by Globo Video distributor. Unfortunately the edition is cut (it seems that somebody has censored the movie), reducing the impact of the violent scenes, and has terrible mistakes in the subtitles written by Maria Tereza Nocera, who translate for example "private" by "sargento" (sergeant in Portuguese) among other "atrocities" like the Brazilian title. My vote is ten.Title (Brazil): "Quando é Preciso Ser Homem" ("When It Is Necessary to be Man")