The Screengrab

20. CASUALTIES OF WAR (1989)



Brian De Palma directed this fact-based story about a bunch of stressed-out American soldiers in Vietnam whose sergeant (Sean Penn) snaps after one of their number is killed and hatches a plan to abduct a young girl and carry her off into the brush, where she’s killed after having been gang-raped. Too painful to have achieved much commercial success, the movie is especially notable for having broken away from most other Vietnam films that came out around the same time, which to some degree or other adopted the line (increasingly fashionable as pundits and politicians insisted on putting that war behind us) that in the chaos of guerrilla war it was forgivable if our boys all went a little insane morally. The hero, played by Michael J. Fox, is the one soldier who won't participate in the rape and who does his damndest to try to get the criminals prosecuted. The irony is that, having been the only one in his crew who refused to shuck off his humanity, he's the only one who's haunted by what happened; he can't come to terms with the fact that he saw it all happen and couldn't do anything to stop it. That makes him the stand-in for everyone who knows that pointless wars are being hatched someplace and don't buy into them, but can't do anything to stop them, either.

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There have always been "women's pictures"--or "chick flicks", to use the self-referential, lightly mocking phrase that Tom Hanks barks out in Sleepless in Seattle as he watches his own off-screen wife, Rita Wilson, tear up while relating the plot of An Affair to Remember. The ever-evolving problem of the chick flick--what Michael Cieply calls "a label that is increasingly viewed as a marketplace trap"--is how to court women without alienating potential male viewers, a big part of your audience if you're hoping to hit date-movie gold. (You also want to hit women in their soft emotional receptors without making them feel stupid about it. Nora Ephron, who wrote and directed SIS after some fifteen years as a journalistic essayist whose specialty was finding smart ways to negotiate her own relationship to the zeitgeist, was well suited by experience and temperament to pull this off. Incidentally, filmmakers pitching their work squarely at the male demographic don't have nearly as hard a time of it. Many men do appreciate it when someone like Tarantino finds a way to serve up shootouts draped with wisecracks in a way that makes us feel smart, but that doesn't mean that a lot of us won't still clomp off to see Rambo, and have no trouble going by themselves if no dates will humor them.)

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The writer Peter Viertel has died, at eighty-six, a little more than two weeks after the death of Deborah Kerr, to whom he was married for forty-seven years. A novelist, journalist, memoirist and all-around freelance word merchant and world traveler of the old school, Viertel wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock's Saboteur, adapted Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man and the Sea for the movies, and did on-location script doctoring on John Huston's Beat the Devil and The African Queen. (In 1992, he commemorated his experiences with Hemingway, Huston and other notables in his book Dangerous Friends.) Yet his best-known accomplishment, and the work that made him a cult figure to generations of readers and movie fans, was his 1953 novel White Hunter, Black Heart. Readily acknowledged to be have been based on the time he spent in Africa with Huston while making The African Queen, the book details the verbal jousts between screenwriter "Pete Verrill" and the flamboyant, high-living director "John Wilson", described by the narrator as "the leading exponent of the 'screw-you-all' type of personality." The book is widely regarded as one of the greatest novels ever written about the movie business. (It was filmed in 1990, with Jeff Fahey as the writer and with the movie's director, Clint Eastwood, swaggering around talking as if the Dust Bowl had settled in his larynx, as the Huston figure.) — Phil Nugent