by Released the same year as his masterpiece Platoon, Salvador of Oliver Stone is a devastating charge against the interventionism of the USA in a country ravaged by the civil war. Punch cinema, committed and enraged, terribly effective.
The world of journalism and war reporters has very often been mentioned in the cinema. And, happily, in great films sometimes become classics: Reds of Warren Beatty; The men of the president; The tear of Roland Joffé who reported the atrocious abuses of the Khmer Rouge dictatorship; Revelations of Michael Mann; Pentagon Papers by Steven Spielberg; Spotlight; The Chinese syndrome; The very effective underfire of Roger Spottiswoode which has the Civil War in Nicaragua in the late 1970s …
A non -exhaustive list that would be incomplete if we omitted a very powerful work signed by one of the most committed filmmakers, not to say enraged, of American cinema: Salvador of Oliver Stone. This third film by the director, shot just before his masterpiece Platoon but released the same year in 1986, is among his best.
Unlike a civil war by Alex Garland, who starts from a freezing and fairly plausible hypothetical postulate with regard to the situation in the United States, Salvador anchors his story in a very real actuality of his time.
“The obsession of being captured alive”
In this violent burden against the interventionism of Ronald Reagan in Central and South America, here the Salvador prey to a terrible civil war which will make more than 75,000 dead, Stone denounces the funding by the United States of death squads, responsible for some of the worst abuses in the history of the continent. As the Salvadoral journalist Oscar Martinez Penate recalled, in his work The soldier and the guerrillera: an oral history of the civil war in Salvadorpublished in 2018.
“Every day, in the morning, on the ways, on public discharges, we find the bodies with exhausted, tortured, cut alive, decapitated, submitted to the most abominable torments before being completed. Teachers are murdered simply because they joined a union. Barbarism is such as a militant is no longer afraid of dying but lives in the haunt of being captured alive” he wrote.
When it was released, the echo of the film was amplified because it described events that were still underway: started in 1979, the civil war in Salvador will not end until 1992, with the Chapultepec peace agreements, signed in Mexico on January 16 of this year.
Hemdale Film Corporation
In the hell of the civil war
Salvador is the story of Richard Boyle, a photo reporter who covered wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, Middle East, Ireland and Central America. In 1980, his private life collapsed: his wife left him taking his child under his arm.
Alcoholic and ruined, he ends up being expelled from home. He decides to go back to Salvador, where he has already managed to win his crust by taking some photos of the fights on the sidelines of the established media. But arrived in the country, he sees his hopes broken by the madness of Salvador of the 80s, in touch with the squadrons of death. In a country with fire and blood, he finds Maria, a woman he once loved, and discovers the horrors of a unknown conflict from the rest of the world …
James Woods and Jim Belushi (supported by a solid John Savage) give the best of themselves in front of the camera of an Oliver Stone still as upset but terribly effective, especially since he was helped on the script by Richard Boyle himself, credited as a co-series.
Hemdale Film Corporation
“Despite my experience in Vietnam, I had forgotten a lot”
On the occasion of a cycle dedicated to him on the TCM channel seven years ago, Oliver Stone returned long, in An exciting interviewon the experience of this film. “In my film, I glorified the resistance against the Salvadoral government, and Richard Boyle, without a doubt. Richard was a friend, he took me there, and it changed my life, up to a certain point. Despite my experience in Vietnam, I had forgotten a lot. […] We had the feeling that America was going to go back to war […]. I then understood how the Vietnam War was born. This is why I made this film so passionately […]
Richard had some bad habits, he was a big drinker, he was Irish, he loved women … He was all a journalist was supposed to be. I took him with me and we worked together on the script, when he was not drunk. […] He was a hell of a good journalist, he left in the most dangerous places. Without him, the film would not be what it is.
Hemdale Film Corporation
“Salvador was refused by all distributors in the United States”
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Salvador, shock and punch cinema, committed, in the end carrying an emotional load to split the stones in half, rocked by the Sublime partition by Georges Delerue. The film was the subject of a beautiful Blu-ray edition in 2022 with interesting supplements around the film. And as it is not available on any streaming platform …
