These three films all focus on spinally injured war veterans in the disabled 'noble warrior' tradition. Although covering the same rehabilitation process, they are each very different.
The Men, set and filmed in a real veterans' hospital, includes 45 spinally injured veterans as extras. Marlon Brando, as Bud Wilozek, makes his film debut with a strong performance, enhanced by staying on the veterans' ward in his wheelchair for some weeks before filming. Bud has refused to see his ex-fiancée, Ellen, preferring to get depressed and isolated. His peers cajole and joke him out of his depression, including a powerful scene in a local bar where Bud gives vent to his feelings against some abusive drinkers and a brawl ensues.
The Men
Dr Brock has his work cut out counselling Bud, but eventually Bud comes to see that he can have a life with Ellie, though the question of a sexual relationship is left unresolved. This probably reflects the era in which the film was made: it includes a strong lecture on post-spinally injured men's possible sexual non- functioning. Carl Foreman's script owes a lot to the month he spent in the veterans' hospital before filming. Many of the hospital scenes and views of the 'vets' are very realistic, a mixture of deep pessimism and optimism. The focus is on the individual coming to terms with his impairment. The style is almost documentary because of the realism of the setting and the disabled extras. Ellen is ambivalent about whether they can get back together.
Zinnemann later made the film Julia (USA 1977 Dir Fred Zinnemann), starring Vanessa Redgrave, which showed a woman with a false leg and her girlhood friend (Jane Fonda) meeting years later, when Julia is heavily involved in resistance to the Nazis. Based on a Lillian Hellman story, this is one of the few portrayals in film of a physically impaired woman. Such portrayals seem even more problematic for filmmakers than male disabled characters.
Coming Home
Coming Home examines, through melodrama, the impact of the Vietnam War on the 'war at home' between the men who fought and the women in their lives. Left alone in Los Angeles when her gung-ho Marine Officer husband, Bob, heads for Vietnam in 1968, 'proper' wife, Sally Hyde (Jane Fonda), decides to volunteer for work in a veterans' hospital. There, she meets Luke Martin (Jon Voight), a former high-school classmate and Marine NCO, who has returned from 'Nam a bitter, volatile, spinally injured cynic. As their relationship grows, Sally sees the effect of the war on the soldiers as they come back, inspiring her to rethink her priorities; Luke's spirits lift and a hospital tragedy helps focus his anger towards a meaningful protest.
After a Hong Kong visit with an increasingly withdrawn husband, Sally finds physical love and companionship with Luke that she has never known with Bob. Luke becomes a deeply involved and thoughtful anti-war campaigner, chaining himself to the Marine recruiting depot and lecturing high school students. Sally leaves her husband to live with Luke. Bob returns injured from Vietnam and appears to commit suicide by swimming off into the ocean.
This film broke new ground in its portrayal of a disabled person as a whole human being with a complete repertoire of feelings, emotions, visceral and sexual needs. Ron Kovic (the author of Born on the Fourth of July) was an adviser on the early development of the film and Waldo Salt (the scriptwriter) helped Ron finish his book. Because of the film's controversial anti-war message, they were not allowed to film in a veterans' hospital, but filmed in a civilian hospital for spinally injured people instead.
Waldo Salt talked to hundreds of veterans while writing his script. This certainly gives the film its 'cinéma vérité' style. The opening scene zooms in on Luke lying down, while other veterans speak off-screen:
I have to justify being paralysed. I have to justify killing people, so I say [fighting in Vietnam] was OK. But how many guys you know can make the reality and say 'What I did was wrong, and what all this other shit was, was wrong, man?' and still be able to live with themselves 'cause they're crippled for the rest of their f***in' life?'
The film is not only empowering for disabled people, but was a great success, winning eight Oscars.
Born on the Fourth of July
Born on the Fourth of July is based on Ron Kovic's book of the same title, and was directed by Oliver Stone as part of his trilogy of films about Vietnam (Platoon, 1986, USA, and Heaven and Earth, 1993, USA, being the others). Stone co-wrote the script with Kovic - a disabled veteran, anti-war campaigner and leader of the disability movement in the USA. The film tells the true story of Kovic (Tom Cruise), a patriotic, all-American, small-town athlete, who shocks his family by enlisting with the Marines to fight in the Vietnam War.
Once overseas, Kovic's enthusiasm turns to horror when he accidentally kills one of his own men in a firefight. His downfall is furthered by a bullet in the spine that leaves him paralysed from the chest down. He returns home, spends a nightmarish stint in a veterans' hospital and follows an increasingly disillusioned path as a wheelchair user, which ultimately finds him, drunk and dissolute, buying sex in a Mexican brothel that caters for veterans.
However, Kovic slowly pulls his life together, becoming an outspoken anti-war activist, leading disabled veterans in besieging, and being forcibly ejected from, the 1972 Republican National Convention in Chicago, along with other protestors. Ron finds acceptance when he speaks against the war at the 1976 Democratic Convention.
Ron's conversion from hawkish super-patriot to impassioned anti-war protestor in reality took many years. In many ways, the film uses Ron's life (born on the same day as the USA) as an allegory for the changes in America in the wake of the Vietnam War and the painful coming-to-terms the country had to undergo. Ron comes across as a complete human being, not defined solely in terms of his impairment, and this is strongly enhanced by the work of Robert Richardson, the cinematographer. Though the highly mobile, often dizzying, camerawork does include a few brief, objectifying shots of Ron (mainly from his mother's and girlfriend's perspective), they are far outweighed by the numerous low camera angles from the 'vet's' point of view, which bestow a sense of heroism on Ron, and frequent tight close-ups of his face. The shots strongly encourage the audience to identify with Ron and to understand the range of his experiences and emotions.
In The Men and Born on the Fourth of July, the audience is left with the stereotype that these men are not capable of fulfilling sexual relationships. Only Coming Home gives the lie to this. The idea of disabled men's sexual dysfunctioning has been the basis of many films, from Lady Chatterley's Lover (UK-France-Germany 1981 Dir Just Jaeckin) to Whose Life is it Anyway? (USA 1981 Dir John Badham), where assisted suicide is the convenient answer for a spinally injured sculptor who argues he is 'dead already'.
Make sure you prepare the ground by covering the material in the Introducing disability in class guidelines before looking at issues in any specific film.
Detailed lesson plans (PDF, 28k)
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