Bellocchio’s corrosive portrait of life in an army barracks presents military discipline as a process of depersonalization and thus anticipates Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. The film follows a new recruit through basic training, with a focus on the strange triangle that forms between him, his captain and the captain’s wife. The captain’s wholehearted investment in making a soldier of the recruit, at all costs, mirrors his mistreatment of his wife due to his paranoid jealousy. Bellocchio here abandons the satire and Brechtian distanciation of his earlier work to present vividly a world of psychosexual conflict and hidden depths, reminiscent at times of Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye.