Rough Guide to Vietnam - Jan Dodd [391]
Vietnam in the movies
The embroilment of France and the US in Vietnam and its conflicts has spawned hundreds of movies, ranging from fond soft-focused colonial reminiscences to blood-and-guts depictions of the horrors of war. As a means of brushing up on your Indochinese history, their value is questionable: for the most part, they’re hardly objective. Yet, through the reflections they cast of the climates in which they were created, these films amplify the West’s efforts to come to terms with what went on there, and for this reason they demand attention.
Vietnam in the movies |
Early depictions
Hollywood was setting movies in Indochina long before the first American troops splashed ashore at Da Nang. As early as 1932, Jean Harlow played a sassy Saigon prostitute to smouldering Clark Gable’s rubber-plantation manager, in the steamy pot-boiler, Red Dust. At this early stage, however, Vietnam was no more than an exotic backdrop.
Even by the mid-1950s, as the modest beginnings of American involvement elicited from Hollywood its first real moves to acquaint itself with Vietnam, the country was often treated less as a nation with its own discernible identity and unique set of political issues, and more as a generic Asian theatre of war, in which the righteous battle against Communism could be played out. In its portrayal of noble and libertarian French forces, aided by American military specialists, confronting the evil of Communism, China Gate (1957) is an early example of this trend. Dedicated to the French colons who “advanced this backward society to its place as the rice bowl of Asia”, its laboured plot, concerning an attempt to destroy a Viet Minh arms cache, is of much less interest than its heavy-handed politics.
Vietnam provided Hollywood with a golden opportunity to project its militaristic fantasies, and a chance to tap into the prejudices brought to the surface by more than a decade of anti-Japanese World War II movies – prejudices that painted American involvement as a reprise of past battles with the inscrutable Asian hordes. Rather more depth of thought went into the making of The Quiet American (1958), in which Michael Redgrave played the British journalist and cynic, Fowler, while Audie Murphy (America’s most decorated soldier in World War II) played Pyle, the eponymous “hero” of Graham Greene’s novel. To Greene’s chagrin, Pyle was depicted not as a representative of the American government, but of a private aid organization – something which the author felt blunted his anti-American message; nevertheless, the movie retained its source’s sense of the futility of attempting to make sense of Vietnam’s political quagmire.
Vietnam in the movies |
Gung ho!
The military mandarins who led America into war failed to get the message, though: with American troops duly deployed in a far-flung corner of the globe by 1965, it was only a matter of time before John Wayne produced a patriotic movie to match. This came in the form of the monumentally bad The Green Berets (1968), in which a paunchy Wayne starred as “Big” Bill Kirby, a loveable colonel leading an adoring team of American soldiers into the central highlands. That Wayne, while on a promotional trip out to Vietnam, handed out cigarette cases inscribed with his signature and the message “Fuck Communism”, speaks volumes about the film’s subtlety. Kicking off with a stirring marching song (“Fighting soldiers from the sky, Fearless men who jump and die…”), the movie depicts American soldiers in spotless uniforms and perma-grins fighting against no less a threat than total “Communist domination of the world”, yet still abiding, as the critic Gilbert Adair has it, “by Queensberry rules”. In stark contrast to the squeaky-clean GIs are the barbaric Viet Cong, depicted as child-abusing rapists who whoop and holler like madmen as they overrun a US camp, all to the strains of suitably eerie Oriental music.
Vietnam in the movies |
Sweeping