Happy Birthday, Wanda June

Happy Birthday, Wanda June is a play by Kurt Vonnegut, and a 1971 film adaptation, directed by Mark Robson.

Big game hunter and war hero 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 slowwitted 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 Harolds 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 It is set during 1960s America, and Harold feels the country has become weak, all the heroes have been replaced by intolerable pacifists, and that in postwar America there is no proper enemy for him to vanquish. This is the story of his tragic attempt to find one.The Wanda June of the title is a young girl who died before she could celebrate her birthday. She was run over by an ice cream truck, but she is very pleased with her situation in Heaven, and feels that dying is a good thing and everyone in Heaven loves the person who sent them there. Her birthday cake was subsequently purchased by one of Penelopes lovers, for a celebration of Harolds birthday in his absence. Wanda June and several other deceased connections to Harold Ryan including his exwife Mildred who drank herself to death because she could not stand Harolds premature ejaculation, and Major Von Koningswald, The Beast of Yugoslavia, Harold Ryans most infamous victim speak to the audience from Heaven, where Jesus Christ, Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, and Judas Iscariot are happily playing shuffleboard. ........

Source: Wikipedia