Air University Review, January-February 1983

Hollywood and Vietnam

UNLIKE World War II and Korea, Vietnam has not provided Hollywood any great stories of aerial combat. Perhaps the planes flew too fast, the targets lacked apparent significance, the dogfights ended too quickly. Whatever the reasons, no epic movies portrayed the Air Force in glorious battle over Vietnam as did Air Force (1943), Twelve O' Clock High (1950), and The McConnell Story (1955) for the earlier wars. Instead, the air war in Southeast Asia has provided only prisoners of war (POWs) as subjects for Hollywood to use in making a comment on the American experience in Vietnam.

Limbo (1973), released just as the POWs returned from North Vietnam, focused on fliers' wives waiting for news of their husbands lost in combat. Rolling Thunder (1977), the first film dealing with Vietnam to reach the screen following the traditional waiting period Hollywood has observed after every war, told the story of a returned POW who wreaks vengeance on a gang of thugs who have brutalized and robbed him and killed his wife and son. Most recently, Clint Eastwood's Firefox (1982) portrayed the actor/director as a former POW suffering from post-Vietnam stress syndrome and pressed into service to steal a top-secret Russian fighter.

To Hollywood, the allegedly unfaithful wives of POWs, the mental aberrations that the men suffered as a result of their experiences in captivity, and their antisocial behavior on returning home symbolized the perceptions Americans came to have of the war. Except for John Wayne's The Green Berets (1968), filmmakers have chosen to portray only the worst things real and imagined, and usually imagined, about Vietnam and the men who fought there. But even before most people concluded that the United States was losing the war, Hollywood had little reason to make pro-Vietnam, wartime propaganda movies as it had done during World War II and Korea.

The growing controversies surrounding the war and the televised combat every evening during dinner made any combat movie a poor financial risk. In addition, the possibility of a negotiated settlement meant that any film in production would immediately become obsolete. As a result, only John Wayne supported his views of the war by making a movie about Vietnam while the fighting continued.

Writing to Lyndon Johnson in 1965, Wayne told the President it was "extremely important that not only the people of the United States but those all over the world should know why it is necessary for us to be there. . . . The most effective way to accomplish this is through the motion picture medium." He explained to Johnson that the

kind of a picture that will help our cause throughout the world [would] tell the story of our fighting men in Vietnam with reason, emotion, characterization and action. We mean to do it in a manner that will inspire a patriotic attitude on the part of fellow-Americans--a feeling which we have always had in this country in the past during times of stress and trouble.

Wayne himself freely admitted that in making The Green Berets he was doing more than playing his usual soldier role. He saw his work as "an American film about American boys who were heroes over there. In that sense, it was propaganda." But it was propaganda for a different kind of war than Wayne had fought in his earlier movies, the good guys versus the bad buys with the good guys winning in the last reel. In Vietnam, the United States had become the powerful bad guy picking a fight with the small, weak guy.

To solve this dilemma, Wayne became the leader of a Special Forces unit that is ultimately surrounded by an overwhelming Vietcong force. The resulting siege resembles a typical John Wayne Western with an Air Force gunship representing the cavalry. Wayne's ultimate failure to create the patriotic feeling of the triumph of good over evil and find a meaningful direction for his movie is best symbolized by the closing scene in which he tells a Vietnamese orphan: "You're what it's all about" as they walk into a sun that sets in the east, into the South China Sea, rather than in the west.

Despite its lack of drama or visual excellence and burdened with almost universally bad reviews, The Green Berets enjoyed success at the box office. Nevertheless, no other filmmaker took a chance that a Vietnam combat story would appeal to audiences either during the war or in the years immediately following the American withdrawal from Vietnam. In fact, Limbo (1973) was the only other major Hollywood movie to explore any aspect of the American experience in Southeast Asia until 1977.

Limbo attempted to make an antiwar statement by focusing on POW wives as victims of the Vietnam conflict. Not knowing when or if they would ever see their husbands again, the women find themselves shunted aside by a seemingly unfeeling Air Force while caught up in their own desires to live normal lives. The Air Force refused to have anything to do with the production, claiming POW wives seldom committed the infidelities dramatized on the screen. The service further argued that the completed movie would immediately be spirited off to Hanoi for showing to the POWs, thereby affecting their morale. The film itself suffered an unlamented demise, not so much because of its dramatic shortcomings as because its release coincided with the repatriation of the POWs in early 1973.

Ironically, Limbo made a direct visual connection to the first Vietnam film to appear in the postwar period, Rolling Thunder. Limbo ended in a freeze frame of a returned POW reaching down an airplane ramp to greet his wife while her lover watches from the shadows. Rolling Thunder opens with an Air Force officer disembarking from a plane to greet his wife after eight years in captivity. The officer, played by William Devane, becomes the symbol for the destructive impact that the war had on individuals and the nation. On his first night home, as he tries to comprehend the changes in his wife--her job, miniskirt, and bralessness--she informs him that she has been with another man and wants a divorce. The film explains Devane's apparent lack of reaction, either of pain or of anger, by juxtaposing scenes of North Vietnam torture sessions with a scene of his demonstrating to his wife's lover the techniques used by his captors.

The impact of his captivity is even more fully illustrated when he is brutalized by a gang of Mexican-Americans seeking the $2000 in silver dollars local citizens had given him on his return home. The film intercuts Devane's silence in the face of beatings and torture (putting his hand in a garbage disposal in a final effort to make him talk) with scenes of his silence during torture sessions in Vietnam. When the gang kills his wife and son, they become the enemy he had not been able to fight in Vietnam, an enemy against which he can vent his pent-up rage for eight years of torture and deprivation.

The Air Force flatly rejected the producer's request for limited assistance, and the Pentagon advised him, "There are no known cases of Air Force officers becoming schizophrenic as happens . . . in the story. Yes, there are cases of returnees coming home to marital problems, but there is nothing beneficial for the Department of Defense in the dramatization of this situation."¹ The Pentagon did acknowledge that there were positive elements in the officer's stoic behavior while he was a POW and conceded that he is portrayed as a loyal, dedicated officer. But the military clearly wanted nothing to do with a story that conveyed the idea that Devane's Vietnam experience contributed to his vengeful pursuit and carefully orchestrated slaughter of the gang.

Reviewers found the violence excessive, and audiences ignored the film. But if Rolling Thunder passed quickly from sight, it undoubtedly deserved a better fate. Its carefully choreographed and tightly edited images of violence combined with a soundtrack that emphasized the dramatic tensions of the story to create a powerful, if bloody, visual impact. More important, its sparsely written script made telling insights into the changes the Vietnam War had made on its participants and American society as a whole.

Both Heroes (1977) and Who'll Stop the Rain (1978) used the same veteran-as-victim thesis to make their antiwar statements. But while the filmmakers visualized the connection between Vietnam and the characters, the stories themselves only indirectly derived their plots from the war. Heroes was simply an off-beat love story starring Henry Winkler as a Vietnam veteran who is "a little touched." Although the war clearly contributed to his mental instability, Winkler was undoubtedly more than a little mixed up before his tour of duty. In any event, most people probably ignored the impact the war had on Winkler's character and instead viewed the film as a light romance. Similarly, Who'll Stop the Rain began with a brief combat sequence, but the story had a largely metaphoric connection to Vietnam, focusing more on the war's aftermath than any direct impact the conflict had on its characters or the nation.

WITH the release of Coming Home in 1978, however, Hollywood finally indicated a willingness to deal directly with the ramifications of America's experiences in a losing war. At the film's end, the protagonist, Jon Voight playing a paralyzed veteran, launched a bitter tirade against the war and what it had done to him. While acknowledging that the story was "interesting and will undoubtedly result in an entertaining and controversial film," the Marine Corps felt that Coming Home would "reflect unfavorably on the image of the Marine Corps."² In turning down the producer's request for assistance, the service particularly objected to the script's portrayal of the widespread use of drugs by officers and men and the comment of an officer about how his men cut heads off enemy bodies in Vietnam.

In using such images, the filmmakers clearly intended that Coming Home make an anti-Vietnam statement. But they managed to dilute the message rather badly somewhere along the way. Most obviously, the message came at least ten years too late. No one in the country, even those who had protested the war most strongly, really cared about the conflict in 1978, at least as a "cause. " Even as an antiwar film, using the "victim" theme to create its message, Coming Home failed to convey the harsh reality that the paralyzed veterans' injuries were irrevocable and must be accepted, that they will never walk again and never be able to perform sexually again. Instead, viewers often miss the reality that Voight is impotent, expecting him to jump out of his wheelchair à la Dr. Strangelove and yell, "I can walk! I can make love!" In the end, therefore, Coming Home stands as a trite love story with a happy ending rather than a significant portrayal of how the Vietnam War affected its participants and loved ones.

If Coming Home and these other films focused on the returned veterans to create their antiwar statements, two movies released in 1978 took the more traditional approach of using images of combat to convey their "war-is-hell" messages. In the end, however, both movies fell victim to the paradox that blood and violence as portrayed on the screen tend to create a sense of excitement and become escapist entertainment instead of stimulating a revulsion against war.

Although it followed a group of young men from their Marine boot camp training to combat in Vietnam, Boys in Company C contained at best only a superficial denouncement of Vietnam. Its newspaper advertisements (that proclaimed "To keep their sanity in an insane war, they had to be crazy") provided more insights into the filmmaker's perspective of the war than anything in the movie. In the film, boot camp training consisted of a stream of four-letter words and a drill instructor mishandling recruits. As a logical extension of such absurdities, all sense of discipline and the military chain of command is lost once the unit reaches Vietnam. And because the movie resembled countless other war films of earlier eras and imitated the ending of M*A*S*H while saying nothing unique about Vietnam, audiences generally ignored it.

Given the content of Boys in Company C, the producers did not even bother to request cooperation from the Marines. By way of contrast, the makers of Go Tell the Spartans did submit their script in hopes of obtaining military assistance. The Defense Department found the story "unusual" in that it showed American advisors in Vietnam in the early 1960s "heroically carrying out their assignment."³ The Army, however, had problems because the script presented "an offhand collection of losers" making up the American unit at a time in history when advisors in Vietnam "were virtually all outstanding individuals, hand-picked for their jobs, and quite experienced."⁴

Given DOD regulations requiring historical accuracy and plausibility in stories qualifying for cooperation, the Army indicated that the filmmakers would have to revise the script if they wanted assistance. Although factual inaccuracies could have been corrected, the script contained an irreconcilable problem. The Army could not accept the Burt Lancaster character of an aging major who explains that his failure to be promoted was due to his being caught making love to a general's wife by the general and the President of the United States. For their part, the screenwriter and producer refused to change the sequence because they liked Lancaster's portrayal. As a result, Go Tell the Spartans received no cooperation.

The film's authenticity resulted from unofficial technical advice given by the deputy director of the Army's Los Angeles Office of Information; he liked the script so much that he took a leave from his job and worked with the director during the shooting. With this assistance, the film did in large measure become a tribute to the Army's advisors in the early days of the Vietnam War. The climactic firefight created the feeling of real combat, unlike the major battle in The Green Berets that looked like a John Wayne shootout with the Indians. But although it became the closest of any Vietnam film released up to that time to capture the American experience in the war and received praise from critics and even the military, Spartans quickly passed from view.

NOT until the release of The Deer Hunter did Vietnam become a financially rewarding subject for filmmakers. By its very size and epic sweep, the movie would have commanded attention. Perhaps impressed by the effort, perhaps equating excellent performances and camera work with meaningful insights, reviewers rushed to acclaim the movie as one "of great courage and overwhelming emotional power. A fiercely loving embrace of life," "the great American film of 1978," and "one of the boldest and most brilliant American films in recent years."

Such initial praise notwithstanding, The Deer Hunter stands as a sham, as a false portrayal of the American experience in Vietnam, a bloated, self-indulgent exercise in filmmaking. In his defense, director Michael Cimino argued that he did not intend to make a historically accurate movie about Vietnam: "It could be any war. The film is really about the nature of courage and friendship."⁵ He described the film as "surrealistic. Even the landscape is surreal. . . . And time is compressed. In trying to compress the experience of the war into a film, even as long as this one, I had to deal with it in a nonliteral way."⁶

Cimino acknowledged that he used My Lai and the fall of Saigon only as reference points and argued that if critics attacked the movie "on its facts, then you're fighting a phantom because literal accuracy was never intended."⁷ Nevertheless, audiences did perceive that The Deer Hunter dealt with the Vietnam War, and to the extent that Cimino distorted the history of the war, his reference points fail to make a comment either on his characters or on the events he portrays.

Ultimately, the film fails to capture the essence of the American tragedy in Vietnam, not only because it presents just a subjective portrayal of the war but because its central metaphor, the recurring game of Russian roulette, bears no resemblance to anything that occurred during the American presence in Southeast Asia. Along with its other inaccuracies, this moved the Army to suggest, after reading a script, that the filmmaker "employ a researcher who either knows or is willing to learn something about the Vietnam War."

However, the Army did not even make that suggestion in refusing to assist in the production of Hair, simply stating, "No benefit to the Army is apparent in the script," adding the service "is not presented realistically."⁸ If The Deer Hunter failed to provide meaningful insights into America's Vietnam experience, Hair, to a large extent, did capture the ambience of the antiwar sentiment of the late 1960s. More important, without drenching the audience in blood, pieces of brain, or false metaphors, Hair succeeded in making the comment about friendship that Cimino failed at in The Deer Hunter.

In Hair, the friendships become sincere and meaningful, and in the end, one man gives up his life for another out of love. Like The Deer Hunter, Hair closes with a song. But in Hair it becomes a song of hope, "Let the Sun Shine In," sung by young people who do not mourn the past or support the nation right or wrong. In contrast to Cimino's film, in which the characters sit like zombies singing "God Bless America," the friends in Hair look to a better future based on the experience of past failures.

ALTHOUGH Hair was more pro-life than antiwar or antimilitary, it required long negotiations at the highest levels of the Pentagon before officials worked out a compromise by which the film's producers received some cooperation from the California National Guard to lend authenticity to the few military training sequences. No such compromise was ever worked out between Francis Coppola and the Defense Department during the making of Apocalypse Now. Hollywood had completed and released its series of Vietnam films, but the movie that had initiated the cycle remained bogged down in a quagmire as deep as the one in which the United States had found itself during the war in Southeast Asia.

Coppola's odyssey had begun in the spring of 1975. Having completed his second Godfather film, the director told an interviewer that his next movie would deal with Vietnam "although it won't necessarily be political--it will be about war and the human soul. . . . I'll be venturing into an area that is laden with so many implications that if I select some aspects and ignore others, I may be doing something irresponsible."⁹

As the vehicle for his exploration, Coppola selected Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness, shifting the story of civilization's submission to the brutality of human nature from the jungles of Africa to the wilds of Vietnam. Throughout the film's tortuous production, Coppola shifted his intended focus from an antiwar film to an action, adventure movie and back again. At one point, he stated that, Apocalypse Now (ultimately dubbed Apocalypse When) was "not antimilitary. It is not anti-U.S. It is prohuman."¹⁰ Later, he described the movie as "an anti-lie, not an antiwar film. I am interested in the contradictions of the human condition."¹¹

To show this, Coppola traced an American officer's search for a Green Beret colonel who had defected to Cambodia where he waged war against both American and Vietcong forces. The Army found little basis even to discuss giving assistance to the director, describing the script as "simply a series of some of the worst things real and imagined, that happened or could have happened during the Vietnam War."¹² Apart from its portrayal of soldiers scalping the enemy, a surfing display in the midst of combat, and an officer obtaining sexual favors for his men, the Army objected strongly to the script's springboard of having one officer sent to "terminate" another officer.

Because of the service's negative reaction to the script, Coppola made no serious attempt to obtain U.S. assistance. Instead, he arranged to obtain cooperation of the Philippine military and began a three-year struggle to complete Apocalypse Now. During production, however, he found that the Philippine Army could not fulfill all his requirements, and the director twice sought assistance from the Pentagon.

At one point, Coppola even telegraphed President Carter, claiming that the Defense Department "has done everything to stop me because of misunderstanding original script which was only a starting point for me." The director described his film as "honest, mythical, pro-human and therefore pro-American." He told the President that he needed "some modicum of cooperation or entire government will appear ridiculous to American and world public." Without explaining his threat, Coppola concluded that Apocalypse Now tries "its best to help America put Vietnam behind us, which we must do so we can go on to a positive future."¹³

Despite his demands, Coppola himself never considered revising his script, even though the change of "terminate" to "investigate" would undoubtedly have led to the Army's providing some cooperation. Yet whether Apocalypse Now with its images of violence could put Vietnam behind the American people remains highly debatable. Without question, the film contained magnificent scenes of the evils that man perpetrates on his fellow man during war. But in creating his images, Coppola visualized all the worst incidents, real and imagined, that he associated with Vietnam rather than provide any significant insights into the total American experience in the war.

Indeed, if the United States had fought in Vietnam as Coppola depicted the war, the Vietcong and North Vietnamese would have driven American forces off the beaches long before the United States actually ended its involvement in Vietnam. Moreover, because his film contains only evil, Coppola fails to create any dramatic tensions in the ultimate confrontation between the two American officers. Consequently, Apocalypse Now lacks a meaningful climax as well as the statement Coppola had hoped to make about war in general and the Vietnam War in particular.

DESPITE its long delays during production and huge cost overruns, Apocalypse Now did ultimately begin to make money. But the lack of any overwhelming box office success for it or the other Vietnam films cooled Hollywood's interest in using the war as a subject. Born on the Fourth of July, based on Ron Kovic's book about his love affair with the Marines and the aftermath of his crippling wound in Vietnam, never got beyond the script stage. Knights of Nam became the first script to receive enthusiastic Army approval, but the producer failed to find sufficient financial support to begin shooting.

Even Don't Cry, It's Only Thunder, a low-budget production made in the Philippines with Air Force assistance, took almost a year to reach the nation's theaters because the filmmakers could not arrange for distribution. Don't Cry, the story of a GI who supports a Vietnamese orphanage, became the first movie since The Green Berets to portray an American soldier positively in Vietnam. Nevertheless, the producer had great difficulty in developing a viable advertising campaign because of the movie's subject. Although it received good reviews, the film met with only limited success.

The return to a negative portrayal of the impact of Vietnam on the American fighting man in Firefox received little attention since the film remained simply a vehicle for Clint Eastwood to capitalize on his box office appeal. Nevertheless, the image of Eastwood broken by his captivity in North Vietnam suggests that Hollywood is still more comfortable with simplistic portrayals of the American experience in the war.

If filmmakers are to produce a definitive statement about Vietnam, they will have to find ways of depicting individual Americans performing bravely and with perseverance in the context of a losing effort while still capturing the essence of the excitement and challenge of combat. In addition, a classic Vietnam War movie will have to depict the enemy as determined human beings, at least as skilled as their opponents, rather than as slant-eyed torturers like those seen in Rolling Thunder, The Deer Hunter, or Firefox.

Only when the courage and atrocities on both sides are portrayed can the ambiguities and complexities of that war become three-dimensional. And only then will the American people have a film that truly provides insights into the nation's experiences in Vietnam. Yet, filmmakers will never be able to show the United States winning glorious victories and making the world a safer place as they could with the nation's earlier wars.

Notes

1. DOD memorandum to Lawrence Gordon Productions, 22 August 1975.

2. Marine Corps memorandum to Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, 13 October 1976.

3. Donald Baruch to Audio Visual Branch, OCPA, Department of the Army, 6 July 1977.

4. Army Office of Public Affairs to Donald Baruch, 28 July 1977.

5. "Stalking The Deer Hunter: An Interview with Michael Cimino," Millimeter, March 1978, p. 34.

6. "Ready for Vietnam? A Talk with Michael Cimino," New York Times, December 10, 1978, Section II, p. 15.

7. Ibid.

8. Army Public Information Division to Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs), 26 April 1977.

9. Playboy, July 1975, p. 65.

10. Francis Ford Coppola to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 22 April 1976.

11. "Coppola Storms Philippines for Re-Creation of Viet War," Los Angeles Times Calendar, June 6,1976, pp. 37,39.

12. Army memorandum to DOD Public Affairs, 16 June 1975.

13. Francis Coppola to President Jimmy Carter, 12 February 1977.

Lawrence H. Suid (B.A., Western Reserve University; Ph.D., Case Western Reserve University) is a contract historian for the Department of Defense. Dr. Suid is the author of Guts and Glory (1978). His doctoral dissertation was on Hollywood and the movies of the Vietnam era. He is writing a history of American Force Radio and Television Network. Dr. Suid is a previous contributor to the Review.

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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