C onventional wisdom holds that Vietnam is the first war America experienced through television. It's true that during the years of American involvement, the images that people saw on the news and read about in newspapers had a profound influence on public opinion. After the war, though, the movies played a more important role in expressing the emotions and questions that had not been resol…
1967 Pierre Why is this Oscar-winning Vietnam documentary so little known? Most guides give it cursory attention, if any, and it's seldom mentioned in discussions of that war. The film is a rough, unpolished, direct look at the early days of American involvement that attempts no grand statements, no conclusions about the futility of foreign intervention in civil wars. It will not appeal to…
1979 Francis Ford Coppola Opinion has always been divided over Francis Ford Coppola's ambitious Vietnam epic. To some, it takes inexcusable liberties with the realities of the war and the geography of the country. Others criticize the crackpot pseudo-philosophical pretensions of the final act. Finally, many reviewers and moviegoers admit those flaws and love the film anyway. Place me in th…
1977 Sidney J. Furie If John Wayne's The Green Berets portrays American involvement in Vietnam as right-wing patriotic propaganda, the pendulum swings the other way in Sidney Furie's realistic, disillusioned look at the war. Structurally, it's a conventional unit picture that follows five young men from their induction into the Marines and through their first months of combat…
1957 Samuel Fuller Sam Fuller's worst war film is worth watching—or at least scanning—for several reasons. The most obvious is the bizarre casting. Then there is the unpersuasive attempt to recreate Vietnam on a studio backlot, which would be duplicated with not much more success years later by Stanley Kubrick in Full Metal Jacket. Finally, both the screw-loose plotting and t…
1978 Michael Cimino The years have heightened the flaws in Hollywood's first major attempt to address the Vietnam War. It remains at times a moving film despite director Michael Cimino's excesses and lapses. The main characters are strong, with the four young leads doing very good work. Seen as any kind of serious comment on the war or the country of Vietnam, it is ludicrous at best,…
1989 Patrick Sheane Duncan Patrick Sheane Duncan's semi-experimental view of a reconnaissance patrol is not for all tastes. He takes the idea of cinema verite to a level that traditionalists may not appreciate. The premise is that all of the action is seen through the lens of a combat cameraman who's making a training film. It will be called “Lessons Learned” and it�…
1987 Stanley Kubrick The first third of Stanley Kubrick's take on the Vietnam War is as powerful and shocking as any film ever made about the military. That's the famous Parris Island section, which made Sgt. R. Lee Ermey a star. Though he had played an essentially identical role in The Boys in Company C, under Kubrick's direction, the stereotypical drill instructor was raised…
1987 Francis Ford Coppola For his second Vietnam film, Francis Ford Coppola answers the cinematic pyrotechnics of Apocalypse Now with a more somber tone. The two films are closely connected with overlapping casts, but the sense of personal loss that hangs over Gardens of Stone is dark and palpable. It can be traced, at least in part, to the death of Coppola's son Giancarlo in a boating acci…
1978 Ted Post In many important ways, this is the best and most intelligent film made to date about American involvement in Vietnam. Though it lacks the cachet of more expensive productions, its understanding of the roots of the conflict and the people who fought it is more profound than Hollywood's best. It's also entertaining, exciting, funny, and features one of Burt Lancaster�…
1987 Barry Levinson Though it is primarily a vehicle for star Robin Williams's rapid-fire free-association comedy, Barry Levinson's approach to the war does not ignore the serious side. Much of the humor comes out of the insanity of the conflict, and this is one of the few films that attempts to see the American presence through Vietnamese eyes. If the plot takes some arbitrary turns…
1968 John Wayne In the long history of Hollywood war movies, John Wayne's bizarre Vietnam epic is unlike any other. The star and co-director falls victim to his own strongly held political beliefs in an alternative masterpiece that piles mistake upon mistake on the way to its justly famous final shot, where the sun sets in the east. All of the flaws evident in The Alamo, which he saw as a …
1987 John Irvin With the commercial success of such idiosyncratic depictions of the war as Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket, a more conventional response was inevitable. This strangely flawed, old-fashioned picture is the result. While the film has been praised by some for its historical accuracy, the soldiers are played by the prettiest ensemble of young actors ever gathered for a …
1986 Oliver Stone Though Oliver Stone has a well-deserved reputation as the enfant terrible of the left, his semi-autobiographical Vietnam film is more viscerally violent than any World War II propaganda. Stone does not present the conduct of the war in the flattering light of those “made with the full cooperation of the United States Army” productions, but his sympathies are with th…
1980 Richard T. Heffron The adaptation of Philip Caputo's Pulitzer-prize winning book tells essentially the same story as Oliver Stone's Platoon. It lacks the adrenaline-pumping action sequences and plot contrivances. In their place are a solidly realistic atmosphere and a deeper understanding of the mistakes that were made in the early stages of the Vietnam War and the people who ma…
1989 Brian Trenchard-Smith This is the film that John Wayne's The Green Berets might have been. When Wayne pitched the idea to President Lyndon Johnson, he said that he wanted to make The Alamo set in Vietnam, and to tell an honest story about the violent tactics used by both sides. Not surprisingly, the Army demanded that its role be sanitized before permission would be given to use bases…
1979 Barry Alexander Brown, Glenn Silber Directors Glenn Silber and Alexander Brown make no claims of objectivity in their documentary about opposition to the war in Vietnam, neither do they attempt to show the nationwide “big picture.” Instead they focus almost entirely on one community—Madison, Wisconsin. While that college town does not have the notoriety of Berkeley or Har…