Fact-based drama about cynical, drug-taking, burnt-out photojournalist and foreign correspondent Richard Boyle (James Woods), who visits El Salvador in the early 1980s to escape his personal problems – his wife has taken his child and left him, he has been evicted from his San Francisco apartment and has no money left – only to find himself in the middle of the bloody civil war ravaging the country.
Boyle, who collaborated on the screenplay with the film’s director, Oliver Stone, had covered wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, the Middle East, Northern Ireland, and Central America. Yet nothing Boyle encountered in his former travels could have prepared him for the horrors of the junta death squads in El Salvador that he would chronicle first-hand with his camera.
Instead of reflecting the brutality and CIA-supported chaos of the guerrilla war in Central America by making his protagonist the film’s moral compass, Stone throws Woods into the melee in search of Hunter S. Thompson-like kicks with his unemployed DJ sidekick, Dr Rock (James Belushi).
It is through Boyle, as the scales fall from his eyes and he marries local girl Maria (Elpidia Carrillo) in order to get her out of the country, that we come to appreciate what’s happening.
Salvador is an extremely violent film. People die in graphic detail, and the viewer is made an involuntary eyewitness to everything.
In one numbing scene, Boyle and a Newsweek photographer chat while taking pictures of rotting corpses deposited on a hillside by the death squad. Especially brutal is the rape and murder of four American nuns arriving from Honduras, who are killed by junta forces to create terror.
Of course, US Army brass and CIA advisers bellow in protest, but the US diplomat, Ambassador Thomas Kelly (Michael Murphy), can only react by cutting military aid pending an investigation. It’s a case of the fox guarding the henhouse.
Originally, the filmmakers planned to film on location in El Salvador. They had a doctored script in Spanish to satisfy the censors, but plans went askew when Colonel Ricardo Cienfuegos, the military attache who became friends with Boyle and Oliver Stone, was shot to death on a tennis court by guerrillas. New locations in Mexico were hastily arranged.
Richard Boyle
James Woods Dr Rock
James Belushi Ambassador Thomas Kelly
Michael Murphy John Cassady
John Savage Maria
Elpidia Carrillo Major Max
Tony Plana Jack Morgan
Colby Chester Cathy Moore
Cynthia Gibb
