The Killing Fields
Until relatively recently most ‘war films’ were depictions of heroic military figures engaged in life-or-death struggles with an armed enemy. The Killing Fields, Roland Joffe’s 1984 cinematic directorial debut, focuses in contrast on the effects of war and the actions of the victors on the people they rule.
Though the plot is mainly concerned with an American journalist and his Cambodian interpreter, it is a very British film, produced by David Putnam, and written by Bruce Robinson (whose place in our movie pantheon is doubly guaranteed given he wrote and directed Withnail and I ). That ability to switch between genres displayed by the scriptwriter is shown by actor Bill Paterson who in the same year made the delightful comedy Comfort and Joy . The score too is Brit, by Mike Oldfield of Tubular Bells fame.
The horrific story of how in the 1970s the Khmer Rouge went about returning their country to a mythical time of communal peasant purity provides the opportunity to paint a canvas of ghastly images of inhumanity and its aftermath, cleverly rendered more comprehensible by concentrating on one man’s story.
Cinematographer Chris Menges (whose credits include Kes and Local Hero ) was one of the film’s three Academy Award recipients; another was the actor at the centre of the film Haing S. Ngor, a real-life survivor of those dark days, illogically put into the best supporting actor category for the Oscars rather than best actor, a decision only partly redeemed by his triumph in it.
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