This international co-production brought the talents of Nagisa Oshima, one of the founding members of the Japanese New Wave and director of the controversial In the Realm of the Senses, to a more traditional genre: the war film. Oshima nevertheless translates the form into an unsettling assessment of two highly ritualistic military cultures in conflict, replete with stylized violence and homoerotic overtones. Set in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Java in 1942, the film contrasts the machismo and hara-kiri ethos of the military captors with the stiff-upper-lip resiliency of their British charges. David Bowie was noted for his performance as the "soldier's soldier" Major Jack Celliers.