Casualties of War

A patrol in Vietnam abducts, rapes and kills a Vietnamese woman. The one soldier who refuses to take part, Eriksson, played by Michael J. Fox, then tries to report it. The real subject is not the war but how the institution receives a report. The source is Daniel Lang's 1969 New Yorker article about the 1966 incident on Hill 192. The same case had already reached the screen twice, in Michael Verhoeven's o.k. in 1970 and Elia Kazan's The Visitors in 1972. Brian De Palma got the financing after The Untouchables succeeded, with Dawn Steel championing it at Columbia and Fox's casting sealing the studio's commitment. Shooting ran from April to May 1988 in Thailand and San Francisco. Stephen Baldwin was fired days into the shoot and replaced by John C. Reilly, in his first film. Reviews were strong at 82 percent, and Roger Ebert described Sean Penn's performance as having overwhelming, brutal power. The box office did not follow: 18.7 million dollars against a 22.5 million budget. It won the Political Film Society Award for Peace and drew criticism from veterans' groups. Who it is for: viewers drawn to war cinema as moral reckoning. Who it is not for: anyone unable to watch the central act of violence. De Palma does not cut it short.