Vietnam War



AMERICAN CINEMA AND THE CHALLENGE OF VIETNAM: 1964–1975

In contrast to the central role played by Hollywood in World War II, representations of the Vietnam War were rare in mainstream American cinema while US troops occupied Southeast Asia. Although a variety of fiction films referenced or showed the influence of the war, few combat films were made about Vietnam during the period of actual combat. Instead, the primary media representation of combat was television news coverage. Because Vietnam was the first "television war," some critics have surmised that an excess of and explicitness in television coverage made the combat film unappealing to audiences—just as some government leaders accused the news media of turning the population against the cause of war. Some vivid, even horrifying, images of the war appeared in print and on television; yet content analyses of television news has shown that, on the whole, war coverage was neither as plentiful nor as sensational as its critics have suggested.

Other factors, both industrial and ideological, appear to have had a more direct effect on the production of war films during the period. Hollywood studios were suffering in the late 1960s from a recession brought on by post-World War II industrial and cultural changes and by their consequent investment in some disastrously unsuccessful blockbuster films. Likewise, there was some difficulty in finding appropriate means to communicate the goals of America's action in Vietnam, as the US government discovered in its failed attempt to utilize techniques drawn from World War II documentary for its first Vietnam-era production, Why Vietnam? (1965). Its title and style deliberately echo Frank Capra's Why We Fight series (1943–1945), as did its rhetorical methods: it attempted to bring a clear moral purpose to the US role in Southeast Asia by comparing Ho Chi Minh to Hitler and Mussolini, thereby representing US action as primarily defensive. It was publicly criticized in 1967, and in 1971 the US Department of Defense report United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967 (also known as the Pentagon Papers) revealed that it had included deliberate misrepresentations. Troubled in its reception, the documentary never achieved its hoped for audience; and, although it continued to be shown to troops, it was pulled from civilian distribution. Similarly unsuccessful in its effort to present the nobility of the American cause, the US Information Agency documentary Vietnam! Vietnam! (1971), a full-color feature-length film executively produced by Hollywood veteran John Ford, was made for international distribution that it never achieved; its clear-cut representations of good versus evil were no longer, considered relevant by the time of its release. Thus for economic and political reasons, both Hollywood studios and the US government were hesitant to put this new war on screen. As a result, by 1970 a number of otherwise successful screenwriters, such as Samuel Fuller, Sy Barlett, and Stanley Kramer, had scripts in circulation that focused on the Vietnam War, but they found no support from studios or from the Pentagon. At the Pentagon, the Department of Defense Motion Picture Production Branch supported only one film during the war, with an estimated $1 million worth of military hardware and expertise: John Wayne's The Green Berets (1968). Studio and governmental reluctance to support projects dealing with Vietnam highlighted what appeared to be the particular difficulty of telling its story—or at least the difficulty of applying the generic formulae that had worked for previous wars, whereby the cause of America is transparently good, the enemy undeniably evil, combat goals clearly defined, and failure unthinkable.

The few combat films made about the Vietnam War during the conflict reflect these difficulties: The Green Berets as well as A Yank in VietNam (1964), Operation C.I.A. (1966), and To the Shores of Hell (1965) made an effort to fit America's complex relation with Vietnam within the parameters of the classic Hollywood narrative and the combat genre, by focusing on a well-defined mission or target; and, each is marked with its own type of ambiguity. Most notable in these terms is the The Green Berets , which applied generic elements of both the World War II combat film and the western in its effort to depict the heroism of the Special Forces and their struggle to protect Vietnamese peasantry from the hostile "Cong." An attempt to garner support for the war when, according to a 1967 poll, public opinion was beginning to move in opposition, it tells the story of a cynical journalist who is swayed to the cause of the war when he witnesses enemy atrocities. In doing so, the film dramatizes the notion that only eyewitnesses can really understand America's war in Vietnam, a war unlike previous wars because its nature and purpose are effectively unrepresentable. The difficulty of understanding and representing Vietnam and its consequent difference from previous wars are themes that persisted in its fictional—and documentary—representations. Films such as the Oscar ® -winning documentary feature La Section Anderson ( The Anderson Platoon , 1967) and A Face of War (1968) underplayed political explanation and contexts to focus instead on the day-to-day experiences of war and privileged the "grunt" point of view as the primary site of knowledge about the war.



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