Roger Ebert's Review..."The Green Barets" June 28, 1968

[Stuart G]

Last edited Fri Apr 5, 2013, 08:29 PM - Edit history (1)

Zero Stars..

The Green Berets" simply will not do as a film about the war in Vietnam. It is offensive not only to those who oppose American policy but even to those who support it. At this moment in our history, locked in the longest and one of the most controversial wars we have ever fought, what we certainly do not need is a movie depicting Vietnam in terms of cowboys and Indians. That is cruel and dishonest and unworthy of the thousands who have died there.

It is not a simple war. We all know it is not simple. Perhaps we could have believed this film in 1962 or 1963, when most of us didn't much care what was happening in Vietnam. But we cannot believe it today. Not after television has brought the reality of the war to us. Not after the Fulbright hearings and the congressional debates and the primaries. Not after 23,000 Americans have been killed.

Whether we are for the war or against it, we all know it is a terribly complicated struggle. There is a desperate need in this country for a film that will depict the war in honest terms. There have been two such films: Eugene Jones' heart-wrenching masterpiece "A Face of War" and the Academy Award-winning documentary "The Anderson Platoon." The Jones film has never played in Chicago. The other closed after a week.

Neither film is against the war. Instead, both try to explain it in terms of the confused struggle there, and the soldiers who are fighting it. It is this sort of film that many Americans hunger for: a film that will tell it like it is. We need no more propaganda.

But propaganda is what we get in "The Green Berets," a heavy-handed, remarkably old-fashioned film. It is supposed to be about Vietnam, but it isn't. The military adventures we see could be from any war. In one, the enemy attacks a camp and the two sides shoot at each other. In the other, a team of soldiers kidnaps a Viet Cong general.





http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19680626/REVIEWS/806260301/1023
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The rest of the review is at the link above......................
Roger was named film critic of the Sun Times on April 5, 1967. So he was on the job for about a year and 2 months when he wrote this.
A young unknown critic takes a shot at a John Wayne film...................

The Green Barets...was a movie about Viet Nam..propaganda......for this death filled war...wrongly fought for the wrong reasons.. I followed Ebert most of my life..as I stated in another post..so..when he wrote this review..zero stars..... in the middle of the Viet Nam War..note (23,000 American killed)...I took real note..and I will always remember it...I had just graduated from college, Roger was new on the job ..and he wrote this great review.. ..... ..one that says a whole lot more about Roger as a person, as we now know...

[Scuba]

1. Pure propaganda from one who never fought.

[truedelphi]

2. Exactly. A movie whose message was to let Americans know that

Soldiers were brave, and spent their spare time forming valuable friendships with the small kids in Vietnam.

Who better than John Wayne for such a role:

[Wolf Frankula]

3. One of My Most Vivid Memories of that Movie

Is the end, and the Sun setting in the East. A good symbol of the cinematic incompetence on view in 'The Green Berets'. And of course Marion plays Marion, as he always did.

Wolf

[GiveMeFreedom]

4. +1 n/t

[longship]

6. The sun sets in the west. But otherwise, okay. nt

[Wolf Frankula]

7. In Reality Yes

But it set off the coast of Vietnam in the movie, and that's in the East.

Wolf

[Adsos Letter]

9. I remember some of the Vietnamese being costumed more like Koreans.

In a course on the Vietnam War that I took in college a guy did an analysis of the accuracy of The Green Berets, as well as its role as a propaganda piece. He really eviscerated it.

[undeterred]

5. He really had a gift.

He taught me how to watch movies.

[edbermac]

8. Scene from the book The Short-Timers by Gustav Hasford

Stanley Kubrick later adapted the Vietnam veteran's book into his movie Full Metal Jacket, though the following was not in that film. The main character Joker narrates:

We go into a movie theater that looks like a warehouse and we watch
John Wayne in The Green Berets, a Hollywood soap opera about the love of
guns. We sit way down front, near some grunts. The grunts are sprawled
across their seats and they've propped muddy jungle boots onto the seats in
front of them. They are bearded, dirty, out of uniform, and look lean and
mean, the way human beings look after they've survived a long hump in the
jungle, the boonies, the bad bush.

I prop my boots on the seats and we watch John Wayne leading the Green
Beanies. John Wayne is a beautiful soldier, clean-shaven, sharply attired in
tailored tiger-stripe jungle utilities, wearing boots that shine like black
glass. Inspired by John Wayne, the fighting soldiers from the sky go
hand-to-hand with all of the Victor Charlies in Southeast Asia. He snaps out
an order to an Oriental actor who played Mr. Sulu on "Star Trek." Mr. Sulu,
now playing an Arvin officer, delivers a line with great conviction: "First
kill...all stinking Cong...then go home." The audience of Marines roars with
laughter. This is the funniest movie we have seen in a long time.

Later, at the end of the movie, John Wayne walks off into the sunset
with a spunky little orphan. The grunts laugh and whistle and threaten to
pee all over themselves. The sun is setting in the South China Sea--in the
East--which makes the end of the movie as accurate as the rest of it.

[Adsos Letter]

10. Material from "Dispatches" by Hichael Herr also showed up in Kubrick's film.

Which isn't surprising, since Herr helped with the screenplay. The scene where the colonel threatens to have Joker "standing tall before the man," and tells him to get with the program and "jump on the team and come on in for the big win" was straight out of Dispatches. A very good book, if by some chance you haven't read it.