Gimme Shelter - The Making Of Casualties Of War
The most brutal, harrowing and serious-minded film of Brian de Palma's career, Casualties... is also the director's most cruelly misunderstand work in more than five decades of scandal and provocation
March 1987. The 24-year-old solider who in court records would later be referred to pseudonymously as ‘Private Eriksson’ tells a US Army court marital that, in November 1966, he had been part of a five-day, five-man reconnaissance mission in the Bon Song Valley. On the first day of the patrol, according to Eriksson’s testimony, his four colleagues kidnapped a young Vietnamese woman from a local village and marched here at gunpoint through a devastated landscape, eventually gang-raping and killing her - capital crimes according to the military code. Although the court accepts Eriksson’s version of events, none of the guilty men receive the death penalty for the terrible things they have done. In fact, on appeal their sentences are reduced. By the mid-1980s, they are all free men.
These then were the facts in the case that inspired Casualties Of War, Brian De Palma’s hallucinatory Vietnam drama, a film that on its release in 1989 was accused of cynically distorting the actualities of this bloody incident and secretly relishing the sexual violence it sought to condemn. Simultaneously blasted by veterans of the war, mauled by critics and even disowned by its screenwriter, Casualties… was in De Palma’s own words “an emotionally devastating experience”, one from which his reputation and commercial standing took ages to recover. And yet, over 30 years later, it stands as one of the most powerful and unsettling war films ever made.
In fact, it’s hard to convey just how savage De Palma’s picture is, nor how savagely it was misinterpreted by its critics. Key to this prickly reception is the fact that Casualties arrived at the end of a decade-long cycle of Vietnam War films that kicked off with Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and climaxed with Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987). It’s possible that, had the gut-wrenching Casualties arrived first, the sub-genre might have died there and then.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to As Luck Would Have It to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.