Movies

December, 1984

Director Norman Jewison's A Soldier's Story (Columbia) is a riveting screen adaptation by Charles Fuller of his own Pulitzer Prize--winning A Soldier's Play. There are still signs of stagy contrivance in the film's flashbacks, each triggered by cat-and-mouse interrogations about a murder. Howard E. Rollins, Jr. (he was Coalhouse Walker in Ragtime), is the sober investigating attorney, a black Army captain sent to find out who killed Technical Sergeant Vernon Waters (Adolph Caesar) on an isolated...