Cadence

Cadence (1990) is a military drama you can watch online on iFILM. Martin Sheen directed it and cast himself as the antagonist, while his sons Charlie Sheen and Ramon Estevez share the screen. The setting is West Germany, 1965.

After a drunken night wrecks his record, Private Franklin Bean takes ninety days in the stockade instead of a court-martial. He lands in a tiny lockup where every other inmate is Black and he is the lone white prisoner. Their jailer, Sergeant McKinney, runs the place by the book and by his own bigotry. Bean braces for hostility and finds solidarity instead, and the men start pushing back against the man with the stripes. Laurence Fishburne anchors the cellblock, and the prisoners turn marching cadence and song into quiet rebellion.

This Sheen-family project plays smaller and meaner than most films about race behind barbed wire: no battlefield, just a locked yard and men who either break or hold. It suits viewers who want a chamber drama about dignity over combat spectacle. F. Murray Abraham turns up in a brief role. Stream Cadence (1990) online on iFILM.