VIETNAM WAR Movie Review

Vietnam War on Screen

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 resolved when the helicopters took off from the roof of the American embassy in Saigon.

This cross-section of Vietnam films is bracketed by two little-known excellent documentaries that approach the war from opposite ends.

The first is Pierre Schoendoerffer's Academy Award winning Anderson Platoon, from 1966. The director, a veteran of the French colonial wars in Indochina, returned to the country and spent six weeks with an American First Air Cavalry unit under the command of a black West Point graduate. Schoendoerffer's grainy, black-and-white film has the hand-held look of American World War II documentaries, but he tells a much less triumphant story. He sees the same mistakes being made again, and he presents them without blame or comment.

Both Sam Fuller's China Gate and John Wayne's The Green Berets are meant to appeal to right-wing fire-eaters but, in the end, they're undone by cheesy production values and cheap special effects, not politics. Others, from D.W. Griffith to Oliver Stone, have proved that a filmmaker can get away with almost anything if he's entertaining enough. The Fuller and Wayne films simply don't measure up, and, to a degree, they poisoned the well for other directors. Doubtless, public antipathy toward the war itself had much more to do with that lapse. It was ten years before another attempt was made to comment on Vietnam.

The Boys in Company C is both a unit picture and a reasonably accurate microcosm of the slow escalation of American efforts. It's R. Lee Ermey's first appearance as a poetically profane drill instructor, and filmmakers Sidney J. Furie and Rick Natkin were the first to set their story during the pivotal Tet Offensive of 1968. (Many others would follow their lead.) Made in the same year, 1978, Go Tell the Spartans treats the historical dimension with even more complexity, commenting on the whole war in one small engagement. It works through a typically superb performance from Burt Lancaster, and is the great “lost” film of that war.

Both Boys and Spartans are modestly budgeted productions, so they are overshadowed by the first two “big” Vietnam films that came from the studios in the late 1970s. The first, Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter, was wildly overpraised in its initial release. Time has made its narrative flaws more obvious, but anyone who dismisses the overheated melodrama and silly history is ignoring the film's emotional power. It was among the first works to admit the deep wounds that the war inflicted on American society, and to suggest that they would heal. That was something that people wanted and needed to believe.

Francis Ford Coppola's monumental Apocalypse Now treats the war as a waking dream. By the time his hallucinatory vision finally arrived on the screen, it had overcome a mountain of well-publicized problems, and had achieved a kind of mythic status that no film could match. Because it did not live up to boxoffice expectations, it was labeled as Coppola's first flop (following The Godfather films and The Conversation). But in the years since, it has developed a devoted following on video. When Coppola returned to the war, via the Arlington National Cemetery in 1987's Gardens of Stone, his tone was more somber.

The made-for-cable adaptation of Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War marks the beginning of a change in Vietnam films. Based on Caputo's tour of duty, it focuses more sharply on the men who actually fought the war. The decision-making process at the levels above them has little to do with the reality of the war as they know it, and so they try to survive and not make too many compromises. Oliver Stone's Platoon deals with similar subject matter, but for the first time, a major Hollywood film depicts Vietnam with the high-caliber pyrotechnics normally reserved for action films. Here, the graphic violence is overlaid on a more serious political base.

Following the financial success of Platoon, the studios became more receptive to other Vietnam-themed projects. Barry Levinson turns it into a stage for Robin Williams's comedy in Good Morning, Vietnam. John Irvin's Hamburger Hill is more successful right-wing propaganda than The Green Berets, but that is hardly a recommendation. Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket is a bleak, believable portrait of Marine boot camp that falls off precipitously when the focus shifts to Vietnam.

More recently, Patrick Sheane Duncan's 84 Charlie MoPic is a successful experiment that follows a reconnaissance team through the lens of a motion picture photographer who is accompanying the men. Brian Trenchard-Smith's The Siege of Firebase Gloria takes the Tet Offensive as its starting point but, unlike virtually all other films about the war, it presents the North Vietnamese side, too, and is the second great sleeper of this group.

Finally, Glenn Silber and Barry Alexander Brown use news footage and interviews to tell The War at Home. Their documentary about the protests at the University of Wisconsin at Madison from 1963 to 1970 could have been made in almost any American college town. They present a portrait of the anti-war movement as a loose confederacy of individuals and groups united by a few overarching issues, the opposite of the well-organized movement, somehow controlled by “outsiders” that so many of its critics claimed. As Silber and Brown show it, the people who opposed the war were doing what they thought was right, just as the war's supporters did. Both sides were passionate, angry, and often intemperate. They overstated their cases. They were insulting and rude. Finally, they became violent and people died because of it.

That was the war in Vietnam and America.