“A group of men thrown together in a single setting: an army barracks in 1965, four men waiting to be shipped to Vietnam. The claustrophobia of the small room intensifies the interactions of men who have little in common, with devastating, violent conclusions. Richie, Billy and Roger, from varying backgrounds (a midwest college graduate, an intellectual homosexual, and a middle-class black), reminisce, joke, play games and taunt each other with racial and sexual jibes. When Carlyle, unhappy and desperate, enters the scene, their tenuous homogeneity is destroyed. Carlyle sees himself as an outsider--no job, no friends; he refuses to adapt, to accept the world as it is. Tensions rise, painfully, almost unbearably; trapped together in the barracks, trapped by their backgrounds and their lives, these men are ‘streamers'--paratroop slang for someone whose parachute fails to open--crashing against the confining walls of a world that holds no future for them.
“A continually innovative director who experiments with cinematic form, Robert Altman decided to adapt David Rabe's popular play of the same title when events in Central America began to resemble those of the mid-'60s Vietnam. The actors were jointly awarded Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival in 1983.” Kathy Geritz