The Killing Fields

Is it ghoulish to say, "Cool, The Killing Fields is out on DVD, I hope it's got heaps of extra footage"?

Just how many more paddy fields full of skulls and corpses can you take?

Thirty years ago next month, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime took over Cambodia, announced it was Year Zero and started shipping people from the cities to work in the fields.

The country was renamed Kampuchea and the Khmer Rouge's vision, if you can call it that, was to create a perfect communist society, where all people would be equal and all would be peasants. Except the Khmer Rouge masterminds, of course.

The simple peasant was held as the ideal figure, not prone to the temptations of capitalism but enjoying the dignity of manual labour. April 17, 1975 was to be the beginning of a new period in Cambodian history.

It was instead a tragedy on a huge scale. It is estimated around two million people, more than one-third of the population, were killed or died of starvation and disease in the four years the Khmer Rouge ruled the country. People were massacred in their hundreds of thousands, some for wearing glasses, because that indicated they could read.

Many of the Khmer Rouge soldiers were children, the generations untainted by progress and capitalism as their parents were.

This week, two former leaders were charged with crimes against humanity.

The Killing Fields, available now on mid-price DVD, is based on a story by Sydney Schanberg (Sam Waterston, from television's Law & Order). Schanberg was a New York Times journalist covering how the war in Vietnam extended into Cambodia.

With his guide and translator Dith Pran (Haing S. Ngor) he is holed up in the French embassy when Khmer Rouge tanks rumble into Phnom Penh, then he and the other foreigners are evacuated.

Dith Pran, despite their best efforts to get him out, is forced to remain and is sent into the countryside with millions of others.

Part of what makes it a persuasive film is that the violence is sudden (motorcyclist tossing a bomb, an incoming shell) and that Schanberg isn't an entirely sympathetic character. He is demanding and self-centred, and often seems dismissive of Dith Pran's best efforts.

Doctor Haing S. Ngor - whose story of surviving the Holocaust is similar to Dith Pran's - is outstanding.

He won an Oscar for best supporting actor. Tragically he was murdered in California in 1996. His family believe it was for opposing the Khmer Rouge.

Elsewhere, John Malkovich plays a photographer, and the late Spalding Gray (the US ambassador) wrote a monologue about his experiences making the movie, which was later filmed as Swimming to Cambodia (1987).

Mike Oldfield's music sometimes swamps the action, but if there is a real dud note it is in the use of John Lennon's Imagine at the end.

Its lyrics about imagine there being no heaven/possessions fit squarely within Pol Pot's murderous ethos.

After The Killing Fields - and no, there is no extra footage - you'll never hear it quite the same way again.