Most audiences familiar with both the stage and cinematic versions of Charles Fuller's wartime story would probably observe that the film is relatively faithful to its source. In most cases throughout Hollywood history, filmmakers have seen the need to make major changes in their adaptations of literary material. Norman Jewison's film takes advantage of the resources of the cinema without disrupting or falsifying the basic plot and themes of Fuller's masterpiece, and this is perhaps the chief reason that the film is so striking and powerful.

That said, something is gained and something is lost in this transition. In the film, the camera moves from place to place, literally showing multiple settings such as the exterior scene of Sgt. Waters's death. The story and the events leading up to the murder of Waters are shown largely in flashbacks in which the settings are literal and realistic, as with Waters's appearing in the night to CJ in the jail cell. In the play the same events are shown, but in blended scenes where Davenport's interrogations of the men fade seamlessly into the antecedent events of Waters's interactions with the men in his platoon, and the gradual uncovering by Davenport of the mystery at the play's core.

In the play, the characters such as Davenport are able to soliloquize in a way that would not seem natural in film. This, too, has its advantages and disadvantages. By its nature, a play can be more "cerebral" than a film, allowing the audience to get inside the minds of the characters, while in film there is an inevitable "distancing." But the experience in the theater is therefore in some sense less vivid, not conveying the naturalistic immediacy of film. At the same time, the playwright can project a directness of thought and emotion, as the characters talk straight to the audience. On stage there is, as well, a fluidity between present and past that can't be achieved in film. In the scene where Waters startlingly reveals the rationale for his frame-up of CJ, Fuller has a solitary light shine on him on stage, as if Waters is addressing all of humanity and revealing his inner soul not merely to his victim, CJ. But simultaneously, the film perhaps more strikingly gets across the devastating impact this speech has on CJ himself that leads to his suicide, especially given the superlative acting of Adolph Caesar as Waters and Larry Riley as CJ.