A Soldier's Story

A Soldier’s Story (1984), directed by Norman Jewison, is a typical kind of lawyer/crime film where a crime is committed in the first scene, and the rest of the film shows how the lawyer interviews witnesses and suspects and gradually figures out who the murderer is. The lawyer hears various accounts of how the crime was committed. He pieces the evidence together, and gradually the facts become clear. The narrative in effect works its way backwards towards the discovery of the evildoer, and in the process offers insights and various points of view into the characters involved.

In this case, practically the entire cast of the film is black. The action occurs at a army base in Louisiana in 1944 where African American soldiers are trained. Although they’ve been told they may see time in battle, in fact they spend most of their time working, cleaning, digging ditches, for the white officers and white troops. The film is based on Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play. Fuller wrote the screenplay for the film. Denzel Washington acted in both the play and film, though he did not have the leading role.

The lawyer assigned by the military to investigate the crime—the murder of a black sergeant—is African American. He’s the first black officer many of the black soldiers or their white officers have seen. There is some suggestion that he was assigned to the case so that the murderers—ostensibly two white soldiers—could not be arrested—no black man in 1944 in Louisiana could accuse white men of murdering a black man and get away with it. A further complication is that the murdered sergeant, Sergeant Waters, played by Adolphe Caesar, treated many of the black recruits cruelly. He is especially prejudiced against Southern blacks and went out of his way to torment them. He believes they impede the possibility of progress for other black soldiers. He is an assimilationist—he believes the time is coming when black men will be allowed to adopt the ways of white men and thereby find financial success and equal justice. He is trapped by his own racial attitudes, and in the scene where he is murdered—revealed in fragments as the film develops—it’s clear that he is full of anguish and guilt over some of his actions. Waters is not a particularly likeable man, and any number of the soldiers—white or black—could have killed him.

The film takes place at a time when the civil rights movement is a decade away. Everyone can feel it coming. The racial dynamics of the time are dramatized through the various characters and their interactions with one another. Howard Rollins plays the role of Captain Davenport, the investigating lawyer. Colonel Nivens, commanding officer of the base, is a native Southerner and not sympathetic to Davenport’s mission—he apparently believes two white soldiers killed Sergeant Waters and does not want them arrested. Scott Paulin plays Captain Wilcox. He is a good-hearted and paternalistic moderate. He is sympathetic to the soldiers and to Captain Davenport, but at the same time he constantly stereotypes them and makes assumptions based on race. Davenport himself makes assumptions—it takes him a while to realize that in Nivens he has an ally, in spite of Nivens’ shortcomings. Davenport comes to the base believing the murderer is a white Southerners, perhaps a Klansman. Sergeant Waters himself is full of racist assumptions. All these characters, but especially Nivens and Davenport, struggle against their own racial preconceptions, and this struggle fuels the dramatic tensions that drive the film, along with the unraveling of the mystery of who killed Sergeant Waters.

All the actors in the film do a credible job, but the entire film has an artificial feeling to it. It’s thesis driven: everything is directed towards the lesson the film seeks to teach about the importance of believing in the humanity of others. It’s formulaic both in the numerous lawyer films it emulates, and in the way it works as a film about life in the barracks—every soldier has his own story, his own personality, and these come out as Davenport moves forward with his investigation. It’s also a film that shows the marks of the play on which it is based. It never gets out of the box in which the play takes place, and even though we know there is a Southern town nearby the base, a town the soldiers are forbidden to visit after the murder, we don’t see much of it and we don’t learn much about how the soldiers feel about the town or how the town feels about them—we see the townspeople briefly, in two clichéd scenes that betray all the usual stereotypes about white racist small Southern towns. This is a shortcoming given that one of the main points of interest in the film is to watch characters discovering the limitations of their own racial assumptions—does this discovery limited to the army base? Or are we to see in some sense the army base and what happens there as a microcosm of the larger society in which it exists? The film has a slight claustrophobic quality to it.

I felt uncomfortable watching the film. It seemed artificial to me. Despite the fact of its mostly African American ensemble cast and the screenplay written by an African American dramatist, it often seemed to be working from a white director’s point of view—everything was too peachy clean, too neat, too washed and starched, too sanitized. It was too easy to read the characters. The lessons and discoveries in the film are too simple and straightforward. In this sense it reminded me of Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple, made only a year after this Jewison film. Despite the fact of the African American authored novel on which that novel is based, it seems to be set in a racial fantasy land. The army base and racial environment surrounding the soldiers in A Soldier’s Story are no fantasy. We just don’t experience enough of it, and as a result the film’s ability to drive home its message is weakened.

Even so, A Soldier’s Story dramatizes an important moment in American civil rights history. The movement itself was accelerated by the involvement of African American soldiers in the second world war, and by the gradual if slow willingness of the American military to treat them fairly. The lessons of the film are important, and for that reason A Soldier’s Story would make a good educational experience for high school students studying the civil rights movement and race relations in the United States.