Norman Jewison, who directed In the Heat of the Night in 1967, again mixes intrigue and racial politics in bringing Charles Fuller's prize-winning A Soldier's Play to the screen. The setting is a Southern army base in the waning days of World War II. Here black soldiers, drafted into a white man's army in which they ironically cannot fight, are kept busy with baseball and internecine wars. A black army lawyer, Captain Davenport (Howard E. Rollins, Jr.) is dispatched to the base to investigate the murder of a black sergeant, presumably by white soldiers. As the story unfolds in flashback bits, it develops that the murdered officer, Waters, was uniformly disliked by his men for his brand of virulence, thinly disguised as graceless authoritarianism. (He is played by Adolph Caesar, who turns in a sinister performance.) Like the Nazi enemy he itches to fight (not to mention his white compatriots), Waters wants to purify the army and the race of "lazy, shiftless nigras" and of course he finds them under every bed. Cool Captain Davenport has his own sardonic attitude toward white condescension and it is one of the ironies of Fuller's story that these two blacks, so opposed in their pride, can never meet.