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Full Metal Jacket
- favourite film

Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam War drama Full Metal Jacket is at first glance a strange film to find in a list of great British movies, but surprisingly it was filmed in this country (with English cinematographer Douglas Milsome): Beckton Gasworks in Newham doubled for Hue City; the marshes of Cliffe-at-Hoo in Kent became Vietnamese countryside with the help of some real Spanish palm trees and a veritable jungle of plastic ones; the Norfolk Broads also featured, and a disused airbase in Cambridgeshire became Parris Island Marine Training Camp, with British army personnel acting as extras. The film though is about the American experience of war, specifically the Vietnam War : the dehumanising of those about to enter combat; the distance put between their lives and normal America, and indeed normal civilised behaviour. It is not an anti-war picture, Kubrick is not overtly political, but is intent on observing what war does to warriors, and how preparation in the end will always be inadequate.
Adam Baldwin and Matthew Modine stand out among the younger actors, but the star at least of the first half is R. Lee Ermey, a Vietnam veteran recruited as technical advisor who ingeniously won the drill sergeant role – he had a video shot of him verbally abusing hired Royal Marines floridly and imaginatively for 15 minutes while he didn’t budge under fire from tennis balls and oranges. Ermey was consequently allowed by Kubrick to improvise perhaps 50 per cent of his upsetting and unrelentingly foul-mouthed dialogue.

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