Williams agreed to work on the film after viewing a rough cut version, and immediately knew that he wanted to have a score which used a beautiful string orchestra to juxtapose the horror and carnage of the war, and which featured a solo trumpet to illustrate the happy, innocent, idyllic youth that Kovic lost in the jungles so far from home. The score for Born on the Fourth of July was by John Williams, and was the first of three films he and Stone did together, the others being JFK in 1991 and Nixon in 1995. The film stars Tom Cruise in one of his career best roles as Kovic, and features Willem Dafoe, Kyra Sedgwick, and Raymond J. Eventually he becomes a pariah ostracized by his family and shunned by the country he served, he turns to alcohol and drugs, before eventually turning his life around and becoming a prominent and successful anti-war campaigner and author. However, Kovic’s experiences in Vietnam are utterly horrific, and he returns to civilian life a haunted shell of a man: paraplegic, confined to a wheelchair, and tormented by bitter nightmares of the conflict. It follows Kovic’s life: he grows up as a typical all-American kid in upstate New York in the 1950s, and enlists in the army when he comes of age, seeing it as his patriotic duty to serve the country he loves. The film is based on the autobiographical novel of the same name by Ron Kovic. Born on the Fourth of July, which was released in December 1989, took an equally harrowing look at what happened to those men when they finally came home. His 1986 film Platoon took a harrowing look at the war from the point of view of the men serving on the front lines, and he won Best Picture and Best Director Academy Awards for his trouble.
Chief among those filmmakers was Oliver Stone, who was himself a Vietnam vet. American involvement in the conflict began in the early 1960s, and lasted until the fall of Saigon in 1975, resulting in the deaths of more than 50,000 American military personnel, and hundreds of thousands more wounded.
In the late 1970s and 1980s a number of prominent American filmmakers took it upon themselves to take a long, hard look at the political and social ramifications of the country’s involvement in the Vietnam War.
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