When the naked body of Army Capt. Elizabeth Campbell (Leslie Stefanson) is found on a Georgia military base, two investigators, Warrant Officers Paul Brenner (John Travolta) and Sara Sunhill (Madeleine Stowe), are ordered to solve her murder. What they uncover is anything but clear-cut. Unseemly details emerge about Campbell’s life, leading to allegations of a possible military coverup of her death and the involvement of her father, Lt. Gen. Joseph Campbell (James Cromwell).
Back in 1999, the preliminary buzz was that the nudity in this film was daring and highly explicit. It didn’t turn out to be quite as shocking as advertised because the most explicit shots were far from the camera, but it was still more than we expect from a big budget Hollywood production that aims at a mass audience. There are four nude scenes, all very similar, and together they earned a place among our top nude performances of 1999. Audiences seemed OK with that, as the film topped $100 million at the domestic turnstiles.
As for Leslie Stefanson, she added no more scenes to her nudography. In fact she didn’t perform in that many clothed scenes either. She fell in love with James Spader in 2003, and retired from acting. They had a son in 2008, and are still together. She is now a sculptor, and I suppose she must be good at it, because she makes a living and wins prizes awarded by her peers. You can catch up with her at LeslieStefanson.com.
This week, Kino Lorber released The General’s Daughter in a new 2-disc Blu-Ray. It has both 2K and 4K versions remastered by scanning the original 35mm negative, so it looks sharp.
About the film:
In general (so to speak), the critics hated the film (RT: 22%), but Tuna loved it, and it got a solid reception from some top reviewers like Owen Gleiberman, Roger Ebert, James Berardinelli, who all conceded that it was not a masterpiece, but felt it was a watchable guilty pleasure film worthy of a C+ or a B-.
I agree with that.
Before I saw the film I had read so much about the rape, murder, and nudity that I was expecting an exploitation film. It’s actually a slick film noir thriller that could be a Raymond Chandler story except that it takes place in the Army.
Scratch that analysis. I just realized that if you wanted to write a Marlowe story today, it would HAVE to take place in the Army, so you could avoid all the political correctness of the civilian world. Travolta’s investigator is as hard-boiled and cocky as they come, and he doesn’t let anybody have an attorney or read them their rights or get any search warrants, and he doesn’t need any stinkin’ badges. (This is not a correct presentation of military justice, by the way). Everybody he investigates outranks him and, as in a Chandler story, everyone lies with every syllable they utter, so ol’ Barbarino uses the traditional detective trick of beating the living shit out of them and/or threatening them with 40 years in the brig and a court martial for hindering an investigation. He slips the cuffs on the high command if they give him any lip, and no courts can tell him not to. He is the law, just like Stallone in Judge Dredd.
It has two of the most important elements of a hard-boiled detective yarn:
1. With the exception of a West Point psychologist, every single guy lied to or stonewalled the investigators
2. The murder victim slept with every available male on and off the base, except two gay guys.
Because of those two factors, everyone was a suspect at one time or another (even one of the gay guys!), and the filmmaker kept diverting our suspicion from one to another. To make it truly delicious, most of the people who were not guilty of the murder were guilty of something or another that they wanted to hide, or that they should have wanted to hide.
It has problems. The two investigators have a previous romantic relationship that creates some banter, but seems pointless and goes nowhere. There’s also an irrelevant prologue and a tone-deaf closing credits scene that probably should have been scrapped in the interest of a tighter story with a consistent tone.
But it’s a good enough watch if you stumble on it during channel roulette.
I saw the movie maybe a decade after it came out so it amused me who played one of the gay guys. Don’t think he’d play that part again.
I found Leslie Stefanson to be a very beautiful woman. Apparently she had a brief relationship with Ryan O’Neal before meeting Spader.