Apparently Tom Cruise, blue-eyed pretty boy star of the appalling Top Gun, had a kind of Road to Damascus experience during the filming of The Colour of Money.
Paul Newman inspired him with his example of a man who is both sex symbol, top actor and ethically impressive public figure and young Tom decided to emulate him. He and his then wife Mimi Rogers got involved in ecological pressure groups and he teamed up with Oliver Stone to make the second of Stone's 'Nam movies, Born on the Fourth of July (Pearl, 9.30pm).
For some, this marked Cruise's first real acting challenge and he met it magnificently. He plays a real-life character, Ron Kovic, who after hearing JFK's stirring call 'not to ask what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country', joins up and gets sent to Vietnam.
And of course it is horrible. Stone had already made one movie about the fighting and the madness, this film only really begins when Kovic's war is over. A bullet paralyses him from the waist down, a revolting military hospital makes his physical recovery torture, and by the time he returns to his parents' place, he is half-crazy. The middle section of the film shows how low Kovic has to go and there are plenty of scenes of heavy drinking and whoring in the Mexican desert that are almost as hard to watch as the baby-killing war scenes at the beginning.
And is Cruise convincing? He is certainly trying to make up for the glorification of war games in Top Gun, and he is certainly not afraid to shed the pretty boy looks for the first time on screen.
The only tentative link I can come up with between that movie and the alternative Men Don't Leave (World, 9.30pm) is that Tom Cruise had a hit with the film Risky Business in 1982, and Men Don't Leave was made by the same director Paul Brickman seven years later.
