Making War
Wake Island (1942)
Directed by John Farrow, B&W, 88 Minutes
Go Tell the Spartans (1978)
Directed by Ted Post, Color, 114 Minutes
Saigon: Year of the Cat (1983)
Directed by Stephen Frears, Color, 106 Minutes
Americans learn their wars primarily through the movies. Who, except for the few who were actually there, can imagine World War II without thinking of John Wayne? The popular medium gives us a way to digest what would otherwise be too terrible to contemplate, to absorb it into the national psyche.
Generally speaking, British World War II movies are much better than American. The British leave out the silly common man comic-relief touches and excessive firefights that Americans want and concentrate on the experience and character of men at war. An exception, and possibly the best American film to come out of the war, is Wake Island. Wake Island tells the story of a few hundred American Marines and construction workers who were caught on the barren Pacific atoll of Wake after Pearl Harbor. Without any hope of relief, they fought skillfully and to the last against overwhelming Japanese sea, land, and air forces.
The combat is well rendered, but the emphasis is on the characters—the Marine commander (Brian Donlevy) who has left a motherless young daughter in Hawaii; common Marines like the inevitable William Bendix and a very young Robert Preston; the engineers and construction men who decline a chance to escape; a handful of pilots (including Macdonald Carey) who sacrifice themselves against impossible odds.
It is a propaganda film, and a very good one. It shows Americans coming together to sacrifice their lives for their country. For their country: because it is, under the circumstances, the right thing to do. There is not a word about saving the world for democracy, nor a single glowing tribute to Eleanor Roosevelt's wonderful plans for postwar reconstruction, not even much about Mother, Apple Pie, and The Girl I Left Behind. Instead there is something approaching the high mode of Western epic, courageously facing unavoidable fate.
The Marine leader mentions (attention, Ruth Bader Ginsburg!) that he is a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute—to which the leader of the construction crew (Walter Abel) replies that he is a Notre Dame man himself. Imagine that—racist, sexist VMI! Reactionary Notre Dame! Both in a film designed to arouse American patriotism. Someone must have known how to appeal to Americans at a deeper level than the average studio executive in Hollywood could aim at, even then—much less today. The most memorable scene in the film is the nighttime burial of casualties, with crosses prominently displayed and the reading of prayers. There are no atheists in the foxholes, one Marine comments. Really. Wake Island will remind you of what our country once was and probably will never be again.
I doubt if we will ever see a good film about the Gulf War, because the whole thing was too silly to make good drama. There have been several unsuccessful attempts at the Grenada invasion, including Clint Eastwood's worst film, Heartbreak Ridge, which was almost as embarrassing as John Wayne's The Green Berets. And we certainly have not come to grips with that strange episode in American history known as the Vietnam War.
The Hollywood treatment so far certainly won't do. The accepted wisdom is that the Oliver Stone and Francis Ford Coppola productions, Platoon and Apocalypse Now!, told the story for us. But in retrospect, these films appear hysterical creations of the alienated. They tell us little about war and nothing about the American experience. The makers of these films hate quotidian America, and their hatred both predates and postdates the war. Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter is a partial exception, since the characters bear some resemblance to actual Americans.
Two films, largely overlooked, do come to grips with the Vietnam War in a way that can reconcile us to the past and teach us a few lessons for the future. Go Tell the Spartans and Saigon: Year of the Cat frame the war perfectly. The first tells of the beginning of the American involvement, the second, of the end. Both portray the tragedy of the time with insight and without hysteria.
Go Tell the Spartans casts Burt Lancaster as a tough regular army officer in the early days of American "advisors." The title of the film is found carved over the gate of a French cemetery near an outpost that Lancaster and his motley crew are left to defend. The Americans should learn something from this, but they don't. Moral ambiguities abound. What if the nice young girl is really, as the South Vietnamese liaison says, a Vietcong who will slit your throat at the first opportunity? The arrogance and ignorance of the brass come through the Great Society bureaucracy abroad. We can hardly have a better picture of the idiocy of the McNamara war machine: An electronic map supposedly shows, by colored lights, where the enemy activity is most intense. We come away knowing that, at the beginning, the end was already ordained.
Saigon: Year of the Cat was panned by reviewers. I think I know why: Its portrayal of the American establishment, especially the Saigon ambassador (well played by E.G. Marshall), is too close to the truth of intellectual and moral failure. Frederic Forrest is a CIA operative who is unable to convince his superiors that "Vietnamization" has failed and that North Vietnam is on the verge of a final push. Judi Dench is an English bank manager who provides a point of view of sane detachment from which to witness the unfolding collapse. The last American departure is portrayed vividly, as is something almost never mentioned in America: the shameful abandonment of allies to their enemies.
These two works of cinematic art, if pondered, might provide us a way of thinking about that strange interlude that may help us restrain our messianic leaders on some other bloody occasion.
Clyde Wilson is a professor of American history at the University of South Carolina. This piece first appeared in the April 2000 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
Entries(RSS)
Dr. Wilson,
I love movies, and I am a Netflix user. I read these reviews in your book From Union to Empire. Users rate the movies from one to five stars, one being they hated it and five being they loved it. There is no doubt most Americans are highly influenced by the elite Hollywood establishment in deciding which movies they should see and which they should like. Hollywood trashed Gods and Generals as being comparable to a defense of Nazi Germany, and it has an average of only 3.0 stars, while the condescending anti-slavery and anti-racism diatribe of Glory with Matthew Broderick gets over 4. After reading your reviews, Go Tell the Spartans and Saigon are waiting for me in my queue. The American government establishment, obviously in cahoots with Hollywood, should be exposed for the incompetent boobs they really are.
An excellent essay. Wake Island and Go Tell the Spartans are indeed great movies. I will now have to watch Saigon: Year of the Cat.
Another WW II movie I would recommend, made shortly after the war, is Twelve O'Clock High.
It came out after this was written, but re. Vietnam I thought We Were Soldiers was very good. I don't recall if there was any overarching moral point. It was just an excellent depiction of these soldiers surprised by the force of the enemy they were facing.
I watched it with a bunch of other Air Force members deployed to Hungary in some GWOT cluster. We were all silent as church mice throughout. Glad, I guess, that our biggest problem was shoddy heaters (thanks for nothing KBR) in our tents instead of getting shot at.
Dr. Phillips, I agree, "We Were Soldiers" is good.
Ancillary to Year of the Cat as a movie, but I'm under the impression that Vietnamization had to do with clearing the Vietcong out of the South, restoring some self-control and autonomy to the villages, and the US leaving South Vietnam but guaranteeing it from a conventional attack from the NVA. According to some --Colby, John Paul Vann, it was working. Thus Vietnamization can't be said to be a failure vis a vis a conventional invasion by the NVA --either preventing or stopping, because it's purpose was never to repel such a conventional, 2nd Generation attack --that's what the our B-52's etc. were for. Or at least that's what we'd guaranteed the South at Paris per a sort of subsidiarity.
Or were those T-34's built in Hanoi?
I spent two years in Vietnam, fought at Dak To, Phu Bai, and other places with no names. We were fighting against NVA regulars, not VC, not treacherous villagers, but a trained army of dedicated killers, and we enjoyed killing them, I must admit. I was 19 years old, a paratrooper, full of myself, and knew nothing about the causes or reasons for the war, nor did I care. None of us cared, except perhaps for our officers. We were filled with terror and with elation simultaneously;with no ability to express it, we knew we were involved in something monstrously grand, something huge and filled with meaning,something that would cast a shadow over the rest of our lives, no matter what else we might do. We had no idea of the meaning. We felt, I guess, I can say this now at age 60, a blood kinship, maybe we felt like the Spartans did at Thermopylae. We loved each other with an intensity I have never again felt, not for any woman, not even my wife. I could write a thousand pages about it but only those who were there would understand. Ee didn't care what the rest of America thought or believed. We laughed at the protesters and we mocked the government. We fought, we bled, we came home. And we remembered.
Red Phillips
Think you're right about We Were Soldiers. A moving piece with the most memorable line being that of the Viet Cong commander remarking to the effect that the Americans will think this is a victory, but they don't realize that the war is now theirs. On old films, Bataan with Robert Taylor, George Murphy and, I've forgotten others, was and excellent piece, with the realism of Wake Island.
Would love to see Junger's Storm of Steel put on the big screen as long as the producer/director doesn't try to attach some message into it either way. Junger wasn't really pro or con with regards to his experiences in WWI, just told what happened. Hopefully the Germans do it, or at least the Brits. Hollywood would use it as some type of propaganda piece as all modern made war movies are.
I live in Korea, and have found that Koreans universally hate "the silly common man comic-relief touches" that you mention in our films.
Seige of Firebase Gloria was also a good Vietnam war film.
The best war movie I have seen would have to be " Ride with the Devil" It is a fiction/fact story of the Missouri Confederate effort in the WBTS.
#10. Again, I agree about "Siege of Firebase Gloria"
Tom, I agree that Twelve O'Clock High was a great movie. A lot of (somewhat heavy handed) psychology in it. Sorry for all the "when I was in the Air Force references," but they showed that movie as part of our leadership course in Officer Training, or what passed for officer training for us docs.
And an interesting piece of trivia that might interest this audience, "B-1" Bob Dornan has a brief part in the movie as a pilot.
Tora Tora Tora is the best work on Pearl Harbor to come out of Hollywood. The 1971 special effects surpass the pathetic computerized effects of the PC farse, Pearl, that came out a few years.
The silliness of the Gulf War is done well in the film No End In Sight, a self-financed documentary that was universally panned except in the pages of Chronicles magazine. MTV also turned out a low-budget effort called Stop Loss, which the neocons denounced in the most shrill tones, but was in fact an excellent film dealing with a group of Texans trying to get back into civilian life, when the army sends them back to defend 'American interests" i.e. New York money. One soldier resists, and is immediately a criminal on the lam.
What Hollywood should produce is a movie about LBJ, McNamara, and the Military-Industrial-Congressional complex. Both men, as we now know, believed the war never could be won. In tapes recently released, LBJ admits in talking with McGeorge Bundy early in the war, "I don't think it's worth fighting for, and I don't think we can get out and it's just the biggest damn mess."
Yet he kept pouring in the troops. Any decent man would have stopped the escalation and pulled out, or resigned and let someone else figure out what to do. But few presidents have been less decent than LBJ.
(Search YouTube for "Lyndon B Johnson's Secret Tapes").
We've had numerous movies on how the sainted Kennedys supposedly saved us from armageddon during the "Missiles of October" in 1962 and on the Kennedy assassination and Nixon's Watergate ordeal. But why no movies on LBJ's murderous perfidy over Vietnam?
I think because such a movie also would taint the Great Society social engineering schemes Hollywood supports.
Though much maligned by critics I thought The Thin Red Line was a very good film, depicting the later days of the Guadalcanal campaign. It was artistically shot and certainly no advertisement for war.
The new film about the Iraq War, The Hurt Locker is a must see. It takes no position on the war itself, but is a brilliant study of men in combat.
I'm surprised no one mentioned Black Hawk Down.
An old favorite of mine is The Key staring William Holden, Trevor Howard and Sophia Loren. It's about the frightening and inglorious lives of salvage tug officers in WWII. It's a gritty black and white with a fine score and great direction by Sir Carol Reed.
I wrote the little piece about two good Vietnam War movies because I thought the national memory, which is to a considerable extent formed by film, needed something more authentic than "Apocalypse Now," "Platoon," and "Full Metal Jacket." Readers have made some other good suggestions: "We Were Soliders" and "The Siege of Firebase Gloria." I would add as passable "The Iron Triangle," "84 Charlie Mopic," "Tigerland," and "A Soldier's Sweetheart." These movies treat Vietnam for the tragedy that it was rather than as propaganda. I would not disdain the Rambo treatment which, though somewhat sensational, is morally serious and it seems to me authentic in the background. Also two hard-to-find French films under the titles "Outpost in Indochina" and "The 317th Platoon."
Finally, although I am no fan of the over-rated writer Graham Greene, the movie versions of his "The Quiet American" are worth a look in this connection. The 1958 versions makes a pairing of cast that is as unlikely as can possibly be imagined: Sir Michael Redgrave and Audie Murphy. But it works. The 2002 version, with Michael Caine, is less but worth watching.
Thomas Howard's praise for "Ride with the Devil" is well taken. It's a great movie. I saw "We Were Soldiers" with a good friend who was in that battle. He said that the only thing they got wrong was that only one helicopter went down. Has anybody seen "The Hurt Locker?"
John, I haven't seen The Hurt Locker, but George McCartney has a fine review of it in the September issue of Chronicles.
Thanks, Scott. I just read it, and it is moving. I know a young man, intimately, who "clears roads" in Iraq. A friend of his tells a story of finding an IED on the way home from a mission, but not having the authority to deal with it. His squad waited for almost three hours in the Iraq sun--they weren't allowed to leave--and a bird flew down and landed on the IED, blowing feathers all over their million dollar truck. Doesn't that sum up the war? My young friend, who is not a cowboy like "The Hurt Locker's" William James, has a good angle on why we are still there. It has to do with who got the contracts to build the largest embassy compound in the history of the world. I want to see "The Hurt Locker" even more after reading George McCartney's review. Clyde, you are right about the national memory, God help us.
Another Vietnam war movie that I recommend is "Hamburger Hill," which was released in 1987 a few months after "Platoon."
David, I don't care for "Hamburger Hill." Rather the sort of thing I was preaching against. It contributes nothing worthwhile to the national memory. It lacks moral weight and is anachronistically multi-cultural as all Hollywood movies are these days.
“Patton” (1970) is the great American war film, from a time when studios expected that the audience was intelligent enough to understand questions of strategy and patient enough to sit and watch the consequences. The deliberations of command are presented throughout the film, from the both the Allied and Axis perspectives, and even from the points of view of the rival Allied senior commanders in Sicily, Patton and Montgomery.
More recent films, almost without exception, focus on the experiences of ordinary soldiers, and lots of explosions. It is presumed that the officers are at best helpless, and that American war leadership and strategy are criminally deficient. The library of Vietnam war films lacks a single depiction of the explicit, and successful, American strategy of containment and destruction of Communist forces and their supply infrastructure. Only in a film like “Flight of the Intruder” (1991) do we get a sense of the destructive power of American arms and men in Vietnam, but again, there is no sense of strategy, no discussion of why aviators are pounding SAM sites in Hanoi in the absence of a conventional ground offensive against the North.
It's been a long time since I saw Hamburger Hill, and I don't remember it well enough to really comment on it. But I am puzzled by the phrase "anachronistically multi-cultural". The army in Vietnam was very multi-cultural and there is nothing anachronistic about so portraying it. That's not to say that the cultures always got along very well - my own unit had a nasty race riot. But all races, cultures, and many foreign countries were represented. Below officers' ranks, however, educated whites were very, very few and far between.
"But all races, cultures, and many foreign countries were represented."
Mr. Higdon,
Would you mind to name them "all" for me? Or what you mean by "all" and "many" foreign countries?
The comment:"That’s not to say that the cultures always got along very well - my own unit had a nasty race riot." This sounds more like a mob, a draft, or a mercenary unit than a volunteer force of patriots. Or maybe the volunteers were mostly officers?
"Twelve O'clock High" was top-notch, one of the best of its genre. Gregory Peck was in fine form and the supporting cast was excellent. I am also fond of "Zulu" and "Breaker Morant".
Mr. Leaberry:
Those are three of my favorite films.
If I could add another, "Paths of Glory" is very fine. Along with "Lonely are the Brave"(aka Edward Abbey's "Brave Cowboy"), "Paths of Glory" is Kirk Douglas at his best.
#25 - By all races, I meant black, white, american indian, latin american mestizo, east asian and various combinations thereof. By many foreign countries, I was referring to soldiers I met who were born abroad, whether or not they were naturalized citizens or had not yet become citizens. I did not keep an exact count of countries of origin. And yes, the army in Vietnam was mostly composed of draftees. Even the officers and units which were technically all volunteer could be considered partially draftee because in those days many "volunteered" rather than waiting to be drafted because you could not get a decent civilian job with military service still hanging over you. I might add that my own service was relatively early in the war (1966) when discipline was still relatively good and morale relatively high. This was before the Tet offensive, before the Hamburger Hill battle, before the breakdown of the US army in Vietnam to a sullen, pot-smoking, officer-fragging, mutinous mob. But the signs of future trouble were already there at the time I was there.
From my experience, Kirt is correct. In my unit, we had a German captain, who was field commissioned, a South Korean, and men from Puerto Rico, Panama, and probably other places that I can no longer recall. I was trained with others from places like Ireland. My little infantry/recon unit was almost all draftees. Most of our officers were either ROTC or OCS graduates. We had one West Pointer, and the field commissioned captain mentioned above. At one point, we had an enlisted company commander, a Sergeant First Class (E-7) who was placed above two Second Lieutenants by the order of our battalion commander. There was considerable racial and ethnic strife in the Army at that point, but we still had strong unit cohesion most of the time. There were still some incidents between blacks and whites. But when our black First Sergeant screwed up a combat patrol he was "leading" and wound up getting a popular black soldier killed, he was nearly fragged by outraged white soldiers. I was there in the First Cav from December of 1968 through the end of January in 1970. Things got steadily worse after I left, especially after the heavy losses in the Cambodian Incursion.
Michael Lee Lanning, an infantry platoon commander in Vietnam, has written several books on the subject. One of his books was "Vietnam At The Movies." Of "Hamburger Hill," he wrote:
"This fictionalized version of the actual event delivers many truths. The actors are convincing in appearance and action; their language, slang, and profanity are accurate; and their weapons and equipment are as they really were. This is an exhausting movie to watch, and while it may not have received the accolades of the media or the monetary returns of "Platoon" and "Full Metal Jacket," it is a much more realistic portrayal of the war and its warriors."
Lanning also praised "Go Tell The Spartans." He has a low opinion of most Hollywood products concerning Vietnam.
#24: "Patton" is indeed a good one. It's mystifying that this great general--the greatest of the 20th century--is not celebrated in more movies--what makes better drama than Patton's almost literally mad dash through France and Germany? The German generals were in awe of the unconventional American. Speaking of Germans, what about "Das Boot"? It's the best of the submarine movies, clearly influenced by a movie I adored as a young kid: "Run Silent, Run Deep."
While not about the Vietnam War per se, one of the greatest of all movies about that era is (in my opinion) The Killing Fields. Whenever I need an illustration of the horrors of totalitarianism to show to younger people, or a real-life example of what the Left is up to in this country, I put on that movie. It's a sobering experience for most of them to discover that such fears are not mere right-wing fantasies and scare-mongering, but have real, historical bases.
The similarity between those ice-cold Khmer Rouge kids holding their own parents hostage in the fields at gunpoint to the indoctrinated youth of our own country gives me chills whenever I think about it...