Under Fire

In the mid-80's in the last century, I lived in a home with HBO and one of the movies that was shown in frequent rotation was Under Fire (1983).  The picture had been denigrated by most critics for reasons that I no longer recall and was a box-office disappointment.  But it was obviously an impressive picture and found a following on cable TV.  Indeed, I esteemed the picture myself and, even, showed it to some friends.  But I haven't revisted the movie in thirty years and, so, I was interested to watch it again recently.  My recollection was that the movie began without much promise but improved radically as it progressed and, at the end, achieved something of lasting importance.  Today, I am unable to detect much difference between the way the film begins and its development over the next two hours -- it certainly seems more of a piece to me than when I watched it thirty, even 35 years ago.  The movie remains impressively produced, an example of seamless, efficient filmmaking with brilliant realized scenes of mayhem and chaos.  But the message of the picture, its essential themes, haven't aged well.  

Under Fire was timely when it was made, a picture set during the Sandinista revolt in Nicaragua.  The movie indicts American foreign policy in Central America and overtly supports the Sandinista cause.  In those days, I was a supporter of Ronald Reagan and so, I wonder, if the film's pro-Sandinista politics initially deterred me from admiring the movie and resulted in my sense that the picture grew in stature as it progressed -- possibly, the effect of me relaxing from initial disapproval of the movie's political stance toward an appreciation of its merits.  The movie is directed by Roger Spottiswoode from a script heavily doctored by Ron Shelton, a very skilled writer who graduated from this movie to pictures like Bull Durham and White Men Can't Jump.  Shelton also directed the second-unit work, the combat footage shot in Oaxaca and Chiapas that is the aspect of the movie that is most memorable.  In fact, I suspect that most of what is noteworthy in the movie is work done by Shelton.  

Under Fire is a romantic triangle set against the background of the civil war in Nicaragua. Nick Nolte looking very young and, even, a bit frail plays the part of Russell Price, an intrepid, even recklessly fearless, combat photographer.  He falls in love with Claire (Joanna Cassidy), a print journalist who is also a bit of an adrenaline junkie.  At the start of the film, Claire is in a failing relationship with Alex (Gene Hackman) a TV reporter later promoted to anchor on the network news.  Alex has covered his share of violence in the world and wants to get away from all the killing.  The movie begins with a civil war in Chad where helicopters battle elephants.  (Price gets a good picture of the fighting which is sold as a cover for Newsweek.)  After the fight between the helicopter gunships and the elephants, Price hitches a ride back to the town on a truck where another American, Oates (a very handsome youthful Ed Harris) is also riding with the African troops.  Oates thinks that he's riding with the government forces but it turns out that the truck, in fact, is loaded with rebel fighters -- to him, the combatants in third-world countries where he works as a mercenary are all fungible.  Oates suggests that Price go to Nicaragua where there's a "nice little war under way."  The film, then, shifts focus to Managua where Price, Alex, and Claire are all covering the war between the CIA-backed Somoza regime and the Sandinistas (led by a charismatic rebel named Rafael).  Alex is sick of covering combat and takes a job with the networks back in New York.  Price and Claire embark on a love affair.  During the fighting, Price and Claire join some rebels involved in a skirmish at a church.  One of the rebels who admires American baseball players pitches a hand grenade a hundred yards into a church steeple where there are a number of snipers firing machine guns at the Sandinistas.  Taking pictures of the corpses in the bell tower, Price discovers Oates now working as a gun-for-hire for Somoza hiding among the corpses.  Price doesn't reveal Oates presence among the dead bodies.  As Price and Claire are strolling away from the church, Oates guns down the merry kid who threw the hand grenade.  By this time Price and Claire are supporting the Sandinista cause -- "it's a nifty war with good guys and bad guys," Claire says.  Price and Claire go in search of the heroic Rafael and find that he's been killed (as earlier claimed by Somoza).  Price abandons journalistic ethics to take a picture of the dead man staged in such a way as to suggest that he's still very much alive.  The Sandinistas take courage and mount an assault on Managua.  Alex has flown down from New York to interview Rafael who is still reputed to be alive and directing the rebel troops.  In the chaos in the capitol, Alex is stopped by a Somoza patrol and executed.  Price shoots the killing with his Nikon and, then, flees through the shanty-town with half the army after him.  With his CIA handler, Somoza announces that Alex, now a world-known celebrity, was killed by the "terrorist" Sandinistas.  Price gets his film to the hotel where it is sent to the networks revealing that the anchor-man was killed by Somoza's troops.  Jimmy Carter, then President, cancels aide to Somoza's regime because of the anchor-man's murder and the rebels win the war.  Somoza flees the country with the bodies of  his father and brother in their lead caskets. In the cheering crowds of Sandinistas, Oates meets up with Price and suggests that they meet next in Mozambique or some other third-world country embroiled in warfare.  We have seen Oates directing mass killings for the regime.  When Price berates  him for these war crimes, Oates says:  "What do you mean?  They're kicking our butts."   

At the center of the story a French double-agent (Jean-Louis Trintignant) works for both sides.  He's sleeping with Somoza's girlfriend and symbolizes old-word Realpolitik as compared with American naivety.  The Frenchman, named Jazy, has been circulating copies of Price's photographs to death squads so that the rebels shown in the pictures can be murdered.  (Jazy's conduct is supposed to echo Price's breach of his own journalistic ethics when he joins with the rebels to make it seem as if Rafael is still alive -- Price's picture of the corpse still seeming to direct troops is dropped by airplanes all over Managua during the fighting to embolden the rebels.)  A bunch of feral rebel kids invade Jazy's luxurious home and murder him.  As he dies, Jazy says that we will see in 20 years what has become of the idealism of the rebels.  This is a prophetic remark:  we all know that Daniel Ortega, who led the Sandinista revolt, became a vicious tyrant and dictator himself, as bad or worse than Somoza.  (Of course, this couldn't have been known when the movie was made.)  

The movie is brilliantly staged.  There are immensely spooky sequences involving panicked soldiers in the empty streets of Managua randomly killing people at check points.  The combat scenes have a raw intensity that seems completely authentic.  Set pieces like the attack on mission tower are effectively filmed with a real sense for terrain, space and distance.  Joanna Cassidy, who sounds a little like Judy Garland (she has a breathy deep voice) is very sexy and compelling as the focus for the rivalry between Alex and Price.  But the romance scenes are intentionally underplayed and shrink into insignificance in the setting of the compelling combat footage.  The movie is politically naive and would be viewed as possibly racist today -- the film shows heroic Americans instrumental in leading the Sandinistas to victory.  It's Price's picture of the dead man seeming to still lead the rebellion that saves the cause.  (It's as if the Sandinistas never heard of cameras themselves and don't know how to take pictures.)  Then, Alex'  shooting saves the day by causing the Americans to divert 25 million dollars promised to Somoza to some other cause -- this precipitates his flight (with his family dead) to Miami.  Implicitly, the film suggests that the Sandinistas are unable to succeed on their own without the help of the Americans in the film -- they lack agency and are viewed by the movie as a picturesque ragtag group of brown men and women who can't succeed except with the assistance of an American savior (in this case the Byronic Nick Nolte).  The film has a good line that underlines the theme:  "50,000 Nicaraguans have died without anyone caring.  But one American journalist is killed and this makes all the difference.  We should have executed an American journalist fifty years ago."  But, of course, the film has the same intrinsic problem -- the war in Nicaragua is used primarily as a background for a love affair between Claire and Price with poor Alex the odd man out.  But the combat scenes are so decisively filmed, much after the documentary manner of Guzman's Battle of Chili or Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers that, in fact, the violence becomes the film's primary emphasis with the effect that the romantic triangle is really never developed in any substantial way.  The movie is well worth watching and extremely well-made but the clash between its intentions (to amuse audiences by showing a romantic triangle featuring attractive Hollywood stars) and its means, a bloody combat film, creates an obvious discontinuity:  there are really two pictures here -- a traditional Hollywood romance and documentary style war movie and, although the contrasts between these genres is fascinating the whole thing doesn't exactly work.

The plot has some glaring holes.  In one scene, Joanna Cassidy as Claire drives through Managua looking for Price and, in fact, finds him.  Managua has a population of about a million people and it seems unlikely she would be able to find this particular needle in this particular haystack.  The film implies that Somoza fled to Miami -- in fact, he is buried in Miami with his ancestral corpses; in fact, he fled to Asuncion, Paraguay where he was welcomed by Alfredo Stroessner but blown to pieces when assassinated the year after the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua.