THE GREEN BERETS Movie Review
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 companion piece to this film, are magnified. As an actor, Wayne had already become a screen icon by 1968. As a director, he never completely realized how to construct a film or how to handle himself. Most of the defects in The Green Berets are simple things that could have easily been omitted.
Wayne is certainly up-front about his politics. The opening scene is an impromptu lecture on foreign policy by Special Forces Sgt. Muldoon (Aldo Ray) to a group of civilians and writers, including pantywaist correspondent George Beckworth (David Janssen). If people could just see what is going on, they'd support the troops, Muldoon explains, and then goes on with the familiar whining about newspapers not telling the truth. Meanwhile, Col. Mike Kirby (Wayne) is assigned to take over command of a Special Forces outpost in the northern part of the country. The rest of the usual suspects are rounded up—Sgt. Petersen (Jim Hutton) the scrounger; Doc McGee (Raymond St. Jacques); Sgt. Provo (Luke Askew)—and off they go to Vietnam.
It takes Wayne and co-director Ray Kellogg almost 45 minutes to get through all of their throat-clearing and scene-setting before anything significant actually happens, and even then, the pace remains glacial. They introduce the South Vietnamese commanders (George Takai and Jack Soo), the cute kid (Craig Jue), and his dog. When the big VC night attack finally arrives, it is less than spectacular. Unfortunately, it is also defined by two cheapjack special effects—the burning of a model helicopter and the collapse of a tiny observation tower complete with dolls—which would not have been out of place in Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space. They are that laughable.
After that bit of business has been resolved with a massive air strike, the plot makes an abrupt turn in a new direction. Kirby and company set out with a femme fatale (Irene Tsu) to kidnap a North Vietnamese general. Clearly, the plot is not meant to comment seriously on Vietnam; it's unashamed pro-American propaganda. Individual North Vietnamese are recognizable because they're so ugly. As a group, they're presented as murderous child molesters and superstitious savages. Then they kill the kid's dog.
While it's true that Wayne's war films and westerns are not known for their subtlety, the better ones have straightforward stories, and they give the star room to portray a character with some dimension. The plot here is a careless hash of cliches, and Maj. Kirby is a cipher. Nothing about his personal life or military background is even hinted at. He's simply John Wayne with an M-16. As Garry Wills notes in John Wayne's America: The Politics of Celebrity (Simon & Schuster. 1997), that is the curious secret of the film's boxoffice success: “For Wayne's fans, its very unrealism may have been its selling point. People who did not want to know about the actual Vietnam War could feel that the national unity and resolve of World War II might turn around this strange new conflict in the far-off jungles of the East. Wayne was fighting World War II again, the only way he ever did, in make-believe; and that make-believe was a memory of American greatness that many still wanted to live by.”
Cast: John Wayne (Col. Mike Kirby), David Janssen (George Beckworth), Jim Hutton (Sgt. Petersen), Aldo Ray (Sgt. Muldoon), George Takei (Capt. Nim), Raymond St. Jacques (Doc McGee), Bruce Cabot (Col. Morgan), Jack Soo (Col. Cai), Patrick Wayne (Lt. Jamison), Luke Askew (Sgt. Provo), Irene Tsu (Lin), Edward Faulkner (Capt. MacDaniel), Jason Evers (Capt. Coleman), Mike Henry (Sgt. Kowalski), Chuck Roberson (Sgt. Griffin), Eddy Donno (Sgt. Watson); Cinematography by: Winton C. Hoch; Music by: Miklos Rozsa. Producer: Warner Bros., Michael Wayne. MPAA Rating: G. Running Time: 135 minutes. Format: VHS, Beta, LV, Letterbox, Closed Caption, DVD.