John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [151]
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portray. I also gave a special arrangement for ‘The Ballad of the Green Berets’ for the opening credit sequence that was different from the record. I have to admit, I liked what I did with it. Then, in the last scene as Wayne walks off into the sunset with the small Vietnamese boy, I used a different arrangement of ‘The Ballad of the Green Berets,’ which I hope was suitably moving and in keeping with the scene—and the theme of the film. The little boy has lost the soldier he has come to love, and he says to Wayne, ‘What will happen to me?’ Wayne says, ‘You let us worry about that. After all, you’re what this war is all about.’
“When I first heard that, I thought, How corny. But I realized that John Wayne was the only actor in the history of cinema who could get away with a line like that. I’d left Hungary and come to America to escape the Communists, so I understood what Wayne was saying.
It moved something in me, and I wanted the music to help the audience to be moved. But I had promised to use that damn song, and I used it the best way I could. And in all the reviews, especially the ones which were particularly bad, I don’t think anyone mentioned whether the music was good or bad. Some film composers say that an audience shouldn’t notice the score, but who didn’t notice the music in Ben-Hur? I think the critics who hated The Green Berets were too shocked and mad at John Wayne to listen to music, so maybe I got off lightly.”
There is one particularly curious thing about the film’s behind-the-scenes personnel. The credits say that the film was directed by John Wayne and Ray Kellogg. When I asked Jim Hutton who Ray Kellogg was, he replied, “Ah, the director of great classics such as The Killer Shrews and The Giant Gila Monster. What rare additions to the art of motion-picture making they are.”
It turns out those pictures do exist, both of them third-rate, low-budget horror pictures made in 1959, and Ray Kellogg did indeed direct them. But I never could find out what his contribution to The Green Berets was. When I asked Miklos Rozsa, he said, “Who’s Ray Kellogg?”
All Wayne would say was, “What can I say about Ray Kellogg and The Green Berets? Without him, my career would not be what it is today.”
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Nobody has been able to convince me so far that Ray Kellogg actually had any hand in the making of The Green Berets, and because Mervyn LeRoy refused to have his name on the credits, I think Warner Bros. may well have decided that anyone’s name alongside that of Wayne as codirector would placate the critics. If so, it didn’t work. The critics savaged the movie when it was released in June 1968. The New Yorker said it was “a film best handled from a distance and with a pair of tongs.”
The Hollywood Reporter called it “a cliché-ridden throwback to the battlefield potboilers of World War II.”
“The Green Berets is a film so unspeakable, so stupid, so rotten and false in every detail,” wrote Renata Adler in the New York Times,
“that it passes through being fun, through being camp, through everything and becomes an invitation to grieve, not for our soldiers or for Vietnam, but for what has become of the fantasy-making apparatus in this country. It is vile and insane. On top of that, it is dull.”
Despite the critical tirade, the film was a huge success, earning more than $16 million in its first four months and becoming one of the top-grossing films of the year. As James Lee Barrett said, “After all the bad reviews, the public still liked it, and so Duke could thumb his nose at the critics. It still galled him, though. I said to him, ‘Duke, if you upset, say, several dozen critics, but you entertain several million paying customers, you tell me where you