A Soldier's Story

Cinema of the 1980s is replete with iconic drill sergeant characters—Warren Oates as Sergeant Hulka in Stripes, Louis Gossett Jr. as Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley in An Officer and a Gentleman, Christopher Walken as Technical Sergeant Merwin J. Toomey in Biloxi Blues, Clint Eastwood as Gunnery Sergeant Tom Highway in Heartbreak Ridge, and, of course, R. Lee Ermey in as Gunnery Sgt. Hartman in Full Metal Jacket. But even in that illustrious company, Adolph Caesar distinguishes himself in this WWII-era military detective story. His Master Sergeant Vernon Waters is one tough bastard whose death incites the investigation that comprises Norman Jewison's adaptation of Charles Fuller's A Soldier's Play.

Howard E. Rollins Jr. stars as Captain Richard Davenport, an African-American Captain from the Judge Advocate General's Corps assigned to investigate Waters' murder. He soon discovers specific difficulties in adjudicating this killing of a Black drill sergeant in a segregated army regiment commanded by White officers in Jim Crow Louisiana. To his fellow captain, white officer Charles Taylor (Dennis Lipscomb), the very fact that the Washington brass sent a Black man to investigate this crime all but guarantees that justice will not be served. The film is a study of racial tensions, but primarily tensions within a company of Black men, most of whom know all too well how far in rank Blacks were allowed to rise in the military during this era and how they are perceived by those around them and those they will eventually be fighting alongside.

The film takes place in an era when Black commissioned officers are bitterly resented by nearly everyone. Captain Davenport experiences this indignation from the enlisted men as much as Waters did. Finding himself in the unfamiliar setting of rural Louisiana, up against reticent Black troops and an unhelpful white chain of command who resent his presence, Davenport must navigate military secrecy, racial prejudice, and old-fashioned dishonesty to solve this most unusual murder mystery. The more we learn about Waters, a drunk, guilt-ridden, bigoted Black man whose brutal character we get to know via flashbacks, the more we understand this conflicted man. There aren't a lot of World War II stories about African-American characters. Hell, in the 1980s, there weren't all that many movies centered almost entirely on Blacks in any genre. These factors alone make A Soldier's Story one of 1984's most unique and notable pictures, but it’s also a damn good movie.

Rollins had scored a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his 1981 role in Ragtime and was largely expected to become the great Black actor of his era, following in the footsteps of Sidney Poitier, whom Jewison had famously directed in 1967's In The Heat of the Night. It would turn out that another actor with a smaller role in this picture would soon rise to claim that status, Denzel Washington, who plays Private First Class Melvin Peterson. Like many in the unit, Peterson is a former player in a Negro baseball league team managed by Waters. He has no love for Waters and describes the man as a tyrant who hated the men under his charge, whom he viewed as ignorant layabouts from the rural South with their Gullah dialect and lack of discipline. You can certainly see the beginnings of Washington's star power on display in this film, though the entire company is impressive, comprising many of the great rising African American actors of their era, including future comedy stars Robert Townsend and David Alan Grier. But the film belongs to Rollins and Caesar, who give incredible portrayals that live on opposite sides of the acting spectrum—Rollins's performance is almost entirely internalized, while Caesar's is a powerfully emotional turn.

Fuller was inspired by Herman Melville's Billy Budd when writing his play, which won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, among other awards. It ran off-Broadway in 1981 with the Negro Ensemble Company under the direction of Douglas Turner Ward. Much of the original cast from the stage production reprised their roles for the movie, including Caesar, Washington, Larry Riley, and William Allen Young. Many comparisons were made between this film and In The Heat of the Night for obvious reasons, but it's not quite on the same cinematic level. For all the brilliant performances, A Soldier's Story never fully transcends its stage-bound origin. However, this limitation helps maintain each character's individual depth and complexity when transferred to the realistic environment of a film populated by a full company of men. This is an ideally cast, powerful human drama, and a solid procedural set in a milieu few movies have ever explored.