Five Gates to Hell

The celebrated author of 1975's Shogun, James Clavell, directs (and produced and wrote) this effective, if low-budget World War II drama. The story takes place in French Indochina (later Vietnam) where a group of two Red Cross doctors and seven nurses are captured by a guerrilla band and taken to the side of a grievously ill warlord. The realities of war and its effects on everyone are brought forward as the doctors are eventually killed, and the nurses use sex as a means of escaping their captors. Brutal scenes of the stabbing of a patient under surgery and the symbolic murder of a nun are qualified by the even-handed portrayal of the damage war does to the human side of human nature.