
“He could have gone for general, but he went for himself instead” – Captain Willard on Colonel Kurtz in APOCALYPSE NOW
Few movies were made about the Vietnam War as it was happening. If one’s impression of American History relied solely on movies between 1965 and 1973, one would hardly realize that the US was involved in a war in Southeast Asia. The big exception was, of course, THE GREEN BERETS, but its box office success was actually a sign of its indifference to the reality abroad and at home. (The Oscar winner HEARTS AND MINDS was a documentary and came out in 1974 after America’s official disengagement.) With no end in sight to the war, a certain segment of the American public flocked to theaters for old-fashioned assurances that Americans are the perennial good guys, welcomed by the grateful Vietnamese fearful of communist tyranny, and unbeatable as warriors led by none other than John Wayne himself(who wouldn’t even have to die like in THE SANDS OF IWO JIMA). In other words, it was a throwback to a ‘simpler’ time when the great majority of Americans was sold on the myth of the Good War.
Surely, no one went to see Wayne’s movie as any kind of reflection of reality; if anything, the audience willfully engaged in the escapism of outdated patriotic glory, the redoubt of those hard-pressed in coming to terms with shifting realities not only abroad but at home. Despite the box office rally, the movie was so bad that it soon became an embarrassment. Even gung ho and Boy Scout types it drew to the theaters could barely convince themselves that the Duke presented anything resembling the situation in the jungles of Vietnam or any viable strategy for victory. There was an obligatory air about it, the kind of emotions usually associated with propaganda and/or ‘narratives’. (There is, of course, the good of its kind, such as SAVING PRIVATE RYAN and THE SANDS OF IWO JIMA.) Had the US prevailed in Vietnam, John Wayne’s movie might have retained, at a bare minimum, historic value as effective propaganda that contributed to the victory, but the US withdrawal has rendered it a political as well as artistic dud.
Not that John Wayne was culturally irrelevant during the Vietnam era. In a paradoxical way, his growing anachronism made him even more appreciated in certain circles, i.e. with so much changing so fast, many people(even young ones) looked to John Wayne as a steadfast icon of the American Essence.
Even if THE GREEN BERETS has been thoroughly forgotten, a good number of John Wayne movies from the era are remembered with fondness, not least TRUE GRIT for which he was awarded the Oscar for ‘Best Actor’.
Furthermore, the emerging generation of cineastes, as film-makers and/or film critics, found themselves somewhat at odds with the Counterculture saturated in radical politics, hippie values, and sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll. Having grown up on a steady diet of John Ford and Howard Hawks reruns on TV, they didn’t necessarily view figures like John Wayne as outmoded has-beens but as reiterations of timeless heroic tropes.
The sensibility owed something to the French critical school of Cahier du Cinema, one that argued that the great Hollywood directors were no less personal artists than the giants of European cinema in which the imprimatur of Art was more obvious. Look past the crowd-pleasing conventions of Hollywood in the works of the best American directors(as ‘auteurs’) and one could discern styles as subtle and sophisticated, the mastery of medium as original and ingenious, and meanings as deep and multi-layered as anything by the best of the European(and Japanese) masters. John Ford’s THE SEARCHERS(along with Alfred Hitchcock’s VERTIGO) was perhaps the biggest beneficiary of this sensibility. Not only could the boomer Movie Brats indulge in the favorites of their childhood but validate them via the intellectual pedigree of French theory.
Oddly, the war films that resonated the most during the Vietnam War Era were set in other wars. Perhaps, a certain historical distance lent wider latitude in addressing/discussing the themes of war(applicable to the ongoing conflict in Vietnam) without stirring up controversy. For pro-war types, nothing could beat PATTON, which opens with the general boasting that Americans never lost a war and hate the very idea of losing. (It was reportedly Richard Nixon’s favorite movie.) For anti-war types, there was Robert Altman and Ring Lardner’s M*A*S*H, set in the Korean War but ostensibly a commentary(with Counterculture overtones) on America’s foibles in Vietnam. Less successful but still potent was Mike Nichol’s eagerly awaited follow-up to THE GRADUATE, the adaptation of Joseph Heller’s CATCH-22, a film made with a budget bigger than PATTON’s but with a sensibility closer to Altman’s film(and Stanley Kubrick’s DR. STRANGELOVE). Whether set during World War II or the Korean War, the audience sensed that the movies, inadvertently or intentionally, had something to say about the Vietnam experience. (Closer to our time, Zach Snyder’s 300 was clearly mounted as a piece of Neocon war porn to inspire young white lads to sign up for the Marine Corp. to fight them ‘Muzzies’, despite the historical setting being nearly a millennium prior to Islam.)
By and large, American Cinema began to address the Vietnam War in a forthright manner only several years after the US withdrawal, especially with the 1978 releases of THE BOYS OF COMPANY C, GO TELL THE SPARTANS, WHO’LL STOP THE RAIN, COMING HOME, and THE DEER HUNTER, followed by APOCALYPSE NOW the next year. It was as if the dam burst, with the once problematic(if not taboo) subject finally out in the open, winning at the box office, garnering the Oscars(especially for COMING HOME and THE DEER HUNTER), and dominating the cultural discourse.
Earlier, Paul Schrader wrote two screenplays with Vietnam veterans as lead characters, TAXI DRIVER and ROLLING THUNDER, but neither directly dealt with the war. In the case of Travis Bickle(TAXI DRIVER), the war experience is probably incidental as his mental issues seem more biographical(or psychological) than traumatic(or medically related to combat); he likely had issues from childhood.
In contrast, the actions of the brooding (anti)hero in ROLLING THUNDER can’t be understood apart from his Vietnam trauma(as a P.O.W. who underwent torture); indeed, his personal battle back home against a band of outlaws(who mangled his hand and murdered his ex-wife and son) seems emotionally a continuation of the unfinished business in the jungles of Asia, with the irony that the enemies at home seem worse than those abroad who, like the hero, were fighting for a sense of ‘home’ against outside marauders(which would be the US military in the case of Vietnam).
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