Happy Birthday, Wanda June

Happy Birthday, Wanda June is a play by Kurt Vonnegut, and a 1971 film adaptation, directed by Mark Robson. The opening of this play is "This is a simple-minded play about men who enjoy killing, and those who don't." Big-game hunter, war hero, and famous soldier Harold Ryan returns home to America, after having been presumed dead for several years. During the war he killed over 200 men and women, and countless more animals - for sport. He was in the Amazon Rainforest hunting for diamonds with Colonel Looseleaf Harper, a slow-witted aviation hero who had the unhappy task of dropping the atomic... bomb on Nagasaki. Harold finds that his wife Penelope has developed relationships with men very much unlike himself, including a vacuum salesman called Shuttle and a hippie doctor called Dr. Woodly, who later becomes Harold's foe. Harold also finds that his son, Paul, has been pampered and grown unmanly. Harold Ryan, the prolific killing machine, is very unsatisfied. It is set during 60's America and Harold feels the country has become weak, all the heroes have been replaced by intolerable pacifists, and that in post-war America there is no proper enemy for him to vanquish.
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