Here's a film that isn't merely a history lesson. It's more like an in-depth examination of the troubled human condition. We keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

Historical Background: The tragedy of The Killing Fields in Cambodia was an offshoot of the War in Vietnam. President John F. Kennedy had committed U.S. advisors to supporting the pro-Western government in South Vietnam against the communist regime in North Vietnam as part of the cold war policy of containing international communism. The North Vietnamese were aided by the Soviet Union. Gradually, "advisors" gave way to troops. President Lyndon Johnson steadily expanded the American involvement and by the end of his first full term, antiwar protests in America had swelled to such an extent that Johnson realized the futility of running for reelection. Richard M. Nixon was elected in 1969 and declared his intent to find "peace with honor" by a policy of so-called Vietnamization, by which he meant turning the war over to the South Vietnamese and a gradual, dignified withdrawal of American troops. Astute readers will recognize this as the same strategy now being proposed by the Bush administration in relation to Iraq. The tragedy in Southeast Asia, ultimately engulfing both Vietnam and Cambodia, is not an issue subsumed by liberal vs. conservative political philosophies, here in America. Kennedy, who got us involved in Vietnam, and Johnson, who escalated the involvement, were two of the most liberal presidents (on domestic issues) that held office since 1950. Nixon, by contrast was conservative, though not ultra-conservative. The flawed manner by which America propagates its power into the third-world is, unfortunately, built into this nation's power structure and establishment, and is not bounded by political ideologies.

Richard Nixon inherited the American involvement in Vietnam and the corrupt puppet governments of Nguyen Van Thieu (in South Vietnam )and Prince Norodom Sihanouk (in Cambodia). In 1970, Prince Sihanouk gave way to General Lon Nol, but it was still an American-bolstered regime. The more America works to prop up a pro-Western government that lacks genuine support among a country's populace, the louder is the thud when that government inevitably collapses. Although the problems in Cambodia were substantially internal and endemic, the secret bombing raids initiated by Nixon not only killed or maimed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, the terror also increased the insanity of the Khmer Rouge and the extremity with which they later dealt with all those who had associated with the Western capitalist democracies. And, when America tires of supporting erstwhile allies, they are always suddenly left to their own devices.

After Nixon took office, he authorized secret B-52 bombing raids not only in North Vietnam, but also directed at base camps of the National Liberation Front (NFL), located in Cambodia, near the border of South Vietnam. From those camps, the NFL could launch raids into South Vietnam and then return to their sanctuaries in neutral Cambodia. Nixon later authorized excursions into Cambodia by American troops, triggering massive protests in the United States, including the ill-fated one on May 4, 1970, at Kent State University, in Ohio, that led to four students being shot to death by units of the National Guard. Nixon not only attempted to conceal his war initiatives in Cambodia from the American public, but the actions were also in violation of international law and, according to many Congressional leaders, unconstitutional. Beginning in February of 1973, the bombing of Cambodia was stepped up in a misguided attempt to sustain Lon Nol's government. For eight solid months, U.S. bombs rained over rural Cambodia, totaling more than all the bombs dropped on Japan during World War II. Many small villages were flattened. Then, in early August, an American B-52 bomber accidentally dropped half its payload on the market village of Neak Luong, southeast of Phnom Penh. More than 125 Cambodians were killed and the errant pilot was later fined $700 for his mistake! On August 14th, 1973, after hearings by the Senate Armed Services Committee, Congress ordered all bombing of Cambodia to be halted. The air strikes in Cambodia lasted for four years and totaled 3630 raids and killed an estimated half-million Cambodians.

The Khmer Rouge, a communist revolutionary army in Cambodia, was engaged in civil war with the Western-supported Cambodian government, which operating from the capital city of Phnom Penh. In the early seventies, Lon Nol's pro-Western government controlled the major cities of Cambodia but the Khmer Rouge controlled the countryside. The Khmer Rouge only grudgingly supported the NFL during the Vietnam War against their common foes, the United States and its puppet governments in Saigon and Phnom Penh. The Cambodians and the Vietnamese had a very long history of ethnic animosities that precluded formation of any lasting ties. Also, the Khmer Rouge received support from China while North Vietnam was allied with the Soviet Union, so the situation in Southeast Asia was being held captive to both Cold War strategy and the competition between the U.S.S.R. and China for influence within the worldwide communist movement. One indication of how little the Khmer Rouge cared for their Vietnamese "allies" is that they immediately moved to seize two disputed islands in the Gulf of Siam after taking Phnom Penh in 1975, while the Vietnamese were still preoccupied with capturing Saigon.

It was April 17th, 1975, when the victorious Khmer Rouge entered the capital city of Phnom Penh. The people of the city naively celebrated, thinking that it meant the end of civil war, at long last. The grim faces of the Khmer Rouge troops belied that optimism. The Khmer Rouge soldiers, many just children and adolescents, immediately began demanding that the people abandon their homes and head into the countryside. They claimed that the Americans were going to bomb the city, but the real agenda was altogether different. To the Khmer Rouge, only the peasants (the "old people" in their parlance) were fit to be citizens of the new ideal communist society. All city dwellers, people with education, those involved in any kind of business activity, those with ties to any of the previous governments, those with military experience other than with the Khmer Rouge, those who spoke French or English, and those who wore glasses (the "new people") would have to be purged. The new society would be built exclusively on agriculture and their plan was to increase the output of rice three-fold in four years. To meet that goal, the peasants were required to work 12 hours each day on rations that were below subsistence standards. Many died of malnutrition or illness. Any caught foraging for extra food were sent away to the killing fields. There, thousands of people were forced to dig their own graves before being bludgeoned and buried, dead or alive didn't matter. The only possible avenue to survival was to meet every demand and to show no signs of education or independent thought of any kind. Only the silent survived.

The Khmer Rouge banned all familial relationships so that they could indoctrinate the children and mold them into fanatical communists. The children were rewarded for spying on their parents and reporting any instances of wrong thinking. Many of the Khmer Rouge cadres were composed exclusively of adolescents. Both the children and the adults received daily lectures to indoctrinate them into the communist ideals. Participants were encouraged to confess past ties or professional training and received hugs and applause for doing so; then, the next day, they would be marched to the killing fields and disappear.

Throughout this time period, none of the peasants in Cambodia had any idea who was running the country. All they were told was that their lives were to be guided by "Angka," meaning, "The Organization." The men secretly behind Angka were Pol Pot (also known as Saloth Sar), Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Chhit Chhoeun (Grandpa Mok the Butcher), and Khieu Samphan. Pol Pot and Samphan had both learned their communist ideology in Paris. As time went on, the leaders of the Khmer Rouge grew increasingly paranoid. At the S-21 interrogation center, political prisoners would be tortured relentlessly to extract confessions and soon those prisoners included even loyal members of the Khmer Rouge cadres. The torture was so excruciating that the victims would confess to anything that was demanded of them.

Pol Pot was especially thorough in purging members of the Khmer Rouge who had witnessed the involvement of the Vietnamese is the early days of Cambodian communism. When Vietnam signed a cooperation treaty with Laos in 1975, it became virtually inevitable that Vietnamese troops and those of the Khmer Rouge would clash. Pot Pol held out the hope that ethnic Cambodians living in South Vietnam might rise up in revolt, but it was not to happen. Pot Pol reinforced his ties to China by meeting with the new leader, Hua Guofeng, in September, 1977. Vietnam decided to take the initiative and launched a brief foray into Cambodia in December. They didn't stay long, but brought back captured troops and defectors, including one Lt. Hun Sen, who they then groomed for future use. A year later, on Christmas Day, 1978, the Vietnamese sent 100,000 troops into Cambodia and made such quick progress that they were able to capture Phnom Penh in just two weeks. Vietnam then set up a friendly government headed by Hun Sen, as prime minister. It was then that the killing fields were discovered, wherein lay the corpses of an estimated 1.5-3 million Cambodian citizens, killed by their own countrymen.

The Story: In 1973, Sydney Schanberg (Sam Waterston) is sent to Cambodia as a correspondent for the New York Times to cover the secret bombing campaign being waged by the Nixon administration on Cambodian villages. Also there are American cameraman Al Rockoff (John Malkovich) and English reporter Jon Swain (Julian Sands). Schanberg acquires a local reporter, Dith Pran (Dr. Haing S. Ngor), as a guide and interpreter. Schanberg and Pran gradually develop a deep friendship as well. Representatives of the American military, such as Military Attache Major Reeves (Craig T. Nelson), repeatedly stonewall Schanberg, especially after an errant bombing run kills over 150 ordinary Cambodians in the market village of Neak Luong. Schanberg also witnesses a bombing of a Coca-Cola warehouse by the Khmer Rouge.

Schanberg is devoted to his profession and determined to get the story out, whatever the cost to his personal safety. (He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his reporting from Cambodia.) After the close of the American embassy on April 10th, 1975, Pran's situation becomes even more precarious than Schanberg's, because the Khmer Rouge is known to be especially harsh in dealing with Cambodian "collaborators." Schanberg decides to stay and cover the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge, but arranges for Pran's family to leave with the evacuation of American personnel. He leaves it for Pran to decide for himself if he'll go with his family or stay in Cambodia. Pran opts to stay. Unfortunately, both he and Schanberg have underestimated the volatility of the situation. A Khmer Rouge cadre seizes Schanberg, Pran, and Rockoff. Pran argues valiantly with the captors while the Western journalists fearfully observe several Cambodian prisoners being summarily executed. Finally, however, they are delivered to the French embassy where the last Westerners are holed up, awaiting evacuation. Only those with valid passports will be evacuated, however, and Pran's has been confiscated. Schanberg and Rockoff try desperately to print a last minute photograph of Pran for a forged passport, but to no avail. Pran is cast aside by the officials and left to fend for himself in the now-tumultuous Cambodia.

Like millions of others, Pran finds himself deported to the countryside to work in the rice paddies. He avoids starvation by eating lizards and sucking blood from live cows. It's a topsy-turvy world in which children rule and their elders serve, the children having been duly indoctrinated into the ways of the Angka (or communist organization). Pran is beaten badly on one occasion but spared from death by a lad who he had once befriended with a gift of a hood ornament from a Mercedes. Otherwise, he does his best to maintain a low profile and the appearance of an illiterate peasant. He avoids the trap of "confessing" his educational background, which would lead quickly to the killing fields. Pran finds an opportunity to escape and makes his way toward Thailand. In the film's most gruesome and unforgettable scene, Pran comes across one of the killing fields, while making his way across a rice paddy. What appeared to be dikes actually turn out to be mounds of decomposing bodies from the political purges.

Pran is recaptured by a small contingent of Khmer Rouge soldiers, led by Phat (Monirak Sisowath), who is a bit more level-headed than average. Phat deploys Pran as a servant and caretaker for Phat's young son (Lambool Dtangpaibool). When the Vietnamese invade in 1978, the soldiers of the Khmer Rouge must head off to do battle and decide to slaughter the peasants, rather than leave them behind alive. Phat, anticipating his own death, decides to entrust Pran with his son and an escape plan to Thailand. Pran hides until the soldiers have departed and then heads toward Thailand with the boy and a group of three other refugees. Following the map provided by Phat, the group makes the trek with difficulty, encountering convoys, squads on the march, devastated villages, mountainous terrain, and a landmine. Two of the men diverge onto a different route and a landmine blows up the man and boy who remained with Pran. Pran, however, reaches the Thai border and a Red Cross operated refugee camp.

Word soon reaches Schanberg in New York that his friend is alive and reasonably well in Thailand. He flies there at once and reunites with Pran at the refugee camp. In the epilogue, Pran returns with Schanberg to New York and takes a job as a photographer for the New York Times.

Themes: Certainly there is a lesson to be learned from what transpired in Cambodia and in nearby Vietnam in terms of the limitations in America's capacity to force its will on small countries in distant parts of the world. Governments created and propped up by America in third-world countries very rarely survive more than a few years, once American support is withdrawn. Rare exceptions can be identified, some ugly and a few worth touting. There are some dubious American bolstered governments currently operating in Central and South America and the dictatorship-like Kingdom in Saudi Arabia in the Middle East. Britain and France established the Israeli government (for better or for worse) and The Allies established the new German government after World War II, but those were both populations with a strong middleclass. Democracy has never yet succeeded in a country without a sizable middleclass (for good reasons). Most puppet governments in third-world countries operate on the basis of a small number of corrupt individuals suppressing their populace in exchange for American dollars. The American sponsored government in Iraq is unstable even with tens of thousands of American troops occupying the country. It will inevitably collapse as soon as America pulls out (i.e., when the oil wells dry up). The greater the violence that has gone into propping that Iragi government up, the worse will be the impact on the Iraqi people when it topples – just as in Cambodia.

It is disconcerting that two reviewers (one here at Epinions and another at IMDB) complain that Schanberg exhibits "knee-jerk liberalism" when he blames the situation in Cambodia on Nixon and the bombing campaign or when he says, "Maybe we underestimated the anger $7 billion in bombing would unleash." How can one seriously take offense at the suggestion that a secretive and illegal bombing campaign against a neutral country that killed one-half million people at an expense of $7 billion dollars might have exacerbated the problems already inherent in that country? Most objective observers recognize that the bombing had a destabilizing effect. As long as politicians sitting comfortably in Washington hold the slaughter and maiming of countless noncombatants in less regard than abstractions like "looking tough," "peace with honor," "the domino effect," and "political polls," America will continue to be a major contributor to world tension, political upheaval, civil wars, and terrorism. To claim that the devastating four-year bombing campaign was not a contributing factor to the insanity of the Khmer Rouge is the worst kind of knee-jerk apologist jingoism.

America needs to get past the idea that the only two alternatives in dealing with international challenges are appeasement or provocation or that the struggle is between liberal or conservative viewpoints. When the first nuclear terrorism occurs in an American city, liberals and conservatives will be incinerated with precisely the same alacrity. The only sound foreign policy in the nuclear age is one that entails neither appeasement nor provocation. America's leaders must studiously avoid giving the country's enemies valid reasons for hating us, while also refusing to give in to any of the invalid ones.

Production Values: The screenplay for The Killing Fields was based on an article in The New York Times Magazine, published on January 20th, 1980, entitled "The Death and Life of Dith Pran," by Sidney Schanberg. It was subtitled "A Story of Cambodia," which is a lot to claim, but fully justified in this instance. The Killing Fields is a faithful adaptation, at least as relates to the particulars of the story. A movie critic for The New York Times complains about the film being cast in the third person, rather than emphasizing Schanberg's viewpoint throughout, but it strikes me that the reviewer in question is perhaps too close to the issue and has lost objectivity. The film takes real chances in deviating from the formulaic approach taken by Hollywood toward war films and one of those chances is changing perspectives, from Schanberg's viewpoint to Pran's, about halfway through. The tactic fits the nature of the story.

The film does not provide a lot of historical context in relation to the politics either in Cambodia or in Washington. Although the back-story is political and humanitarian in nature, the main thrust of the film is the intense personal drama involving the two lead characters. By itself, the film is not strong as a history lesson, but in combination with a review of the historical context, such as the Historical Background section above, you can learn a lot about both the broad context and how it played out at the level of individuals.

This film was shot in the jungles, rice paddies, villages, and cities of Thailand, which borders on Cambodia. Every shot is well-composed and rich with color. Cinematographer Chris Menges deservedly won an Oscar for his work. The 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen DVD transfer shows off the great photography to maximum effect. By contrast, the soundtrack by Mike Oldfield leaves a lot to be desired. In fact, it is sometimes jarringly inappropriate. The Dolby Digital 2.0 surround sound reproduction on the DVD is excellent.

One of the smartest choices made by English director Roland Joffé (born 1945 in London) was the selection of Cambodian Dr. Haing S. Ngor to play the part of Pran. Ngor had no prior experience as an actor (he was a gynecologist), but a story of such great importance to the Cambodian people deserves to feature a Cambodian. Ngor lends the film real authenticity and comports himself admirably in a role with relatively few lines. Ngor's own story during the Khmer Rouge years was not unlike that of Pran. Ngor won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his work. Whether he should have instead got the award for Best Actor is an open question. He was so recognized by both the British Film Academy and the Boston Film Critics. Tragically, Ngor was later murdered by Asian gang members during a robbery attempt in 1996, when he refused to surrender a locket containing a picture of his spouse who had been left to die in childbirth by the Khmer Rouge.

Sam Waterston had previously appeared in such films as Rancho Deluxe (1975), Interiors (1978), and Heaven's Gate (1980), but The Killing Fields was a career role. Most American viewers will know Waterston from his television role on Law and Order, for which he thrice received Emmy nominations. He also appeared in Swimming to Cambodia (1987). Waterston received an Oscar nomination as Best Actor for his fine dramatic performance as Schanberg. Among the supporting roles, the inimitable John Malkovich provided the standout performance, as Alan Rockoff, the Photographer.

Bottom-Line: The Killing Fields earned seven Oscar nominations and three trophies. The wins came in the categories of Best Supporting Actor, Best Cinematography, and Best Film Editing. The other four nominations were for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Screenplay. The only DVD extra of any importance is an intriguing commentary tract provided by director Joffé. The theatrical trailer is also included, along with a list of the cast and crew, a biography of Dr. Haing S. Ngor, and a list of the film's awards. This is a great film by any standard and a must-see for all who want to understand America's tragic involvement in Cambodia.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age