In January 1945, Private Eddie Slovik was executed in France, the only American soldier shot for desertion since the civil war. General Eisenhower refused to commute the sentence (as he later, when president, refused to reprieve the Rosenbergs).

The Pentagon attempted unsuccessfully to repress William Bradford Huie's 1954 book on the subject. In 1960, Frank Sinatra cancelled his proposed film version (scripted by blacklisted writer Albert Maltz) under pressure from Joseph Kennedy, who thought Sinatra's involvement in such a controversial project would damage JFK's presidential prospects. In formerly blacklisted Carl Foreman's The Victors (1963), a wintry firing squad scene inspired by the Slovik affair is accompanied by Sinatra's Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.

The movie was finally made for TV by the reliable Lamont Johnson. It attracted a record audience for a one-off TV drama and is a sombre, sober, unsentimental work about chance fate, the arbitrary horrors of war and people trapped in a bureaucratic machine.

The film unfolds in flashbacks from the day of execution and Martin Sheen gives one of his finest performances as the sad, bewildered young GI, a former petty criminal torn from a brief experience of happiness with his loving wife and sent to war. Ned Beatty is excellent as the chaplain assigned to care for Slovik in his final hours. It can be spoken of in the same breath as Kubrick's Paths of Glory and Losey's King & Country.