Elements which had to do with the sexual nature of the murder which is the main hook of the story.

James Woods as the head of the 'Psych Op' unit, where the General's daughter used to work.

“I had to shoot and edit it in a way that you couldn’t get off on all of this weird stuff,” West told the Los Angeles Daily News’ Bob Strauss. “It had to be just enough to show what was going on - the pain and bizarreness of it - but without enough for it to be salacious.”

For the film-makers, there was another problem. The General’s Daughter, with its breathless murder investigation and its undercurrents of sadomasochism and sexual deviancy, was such a steamy story that many at first doubted it could be made into a mainstream film.

The General’s Daughter is set in a place where weird behaviour might not initially be expected: on a very staid, very traditional US Army base in the Deep South (the film was shot in and around Savannah, Georgia, at the height of summer, creating an atmosphere so authentic you can almost smell the swamps). It focuses on an investigation into the brutal rape and murder of a beautiful and successful young career Captain called Elisabeth Campbell, played by up-and-coming actress Leslie Stefanson. The investigation is carried out by maverick Army CID officer Paul Brenner (Travolta) and it is swiftly complicated by three things.

The first is that Captain Campbell is the daughter of Army legend Joseph ‘Fighting Joe’ Campbell (James Cromwell), who is about to leave the military and take the Eisenhower route into politics. The second is that Brenner has only 36 hours to complete his investigation before the Army will be forced to turn the case over to the FBI and, as a result, bring the media swarming all over its dirty secrets.

And the third complication comes from just how dirty those secrets prove to be: far from being a casual victim, Captain Campbell - an officer with the base’s covert Psychological Operations (Psych Op) division - is revealed to have had a distinctly perverse private life which turns out to have been pretty common knowledge around Fort MacCallum.