Hacker Cinema
The Green Berets
1968 · Film · 142 min
Directed by John Wayne, Ray Kellogg
Col. Mike Kirby picks two teams of crack Green Berets for two missions in South Vietnam. The first is to strengthen a camp that is trying to be taken by the enemy. The second is to kidnap a North Vietnamese General.
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7 comments on Hacker News
I thought this has been common knowledge forever. I mean, if you see before the closing titles something like
"With grateful thanks to the US Navy and Airforce, without whom this film could not have been made"
then you have to assume that the helpful armed forces at least got approval of the final cut. At any rate, I've always thought that stuff like The Green Berets with John Wayne was pure war propaganda.
I prefer that my propoganda have no whitewashing, and star real American men such as John Wayne:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Berets_(film)
The last paragraph of the piece kinda struck me:
"And perhaps if others saw more realistic portrayals of poverty in the movies, they might be more receptive to programs that would help them instead of demeaning and punishing them."
I would love an example where 'realistic portrayals' of a given subject in movies led to changes in public policy / public perception.
If anything, I would argue that popular films, just like other art forms, are more likely to serve as a barometer of society's perception/reception of a given subject than as something that ignites the change.
Take the war in Vietnam in the 60's and 70's - I'm not sure you could make 'The Deer Hunter' in '68, or 'The Green Berets' in '78.
Or the war on drugs - movies like Trainspotting, Requiem for a Dream, or Traffic certainly showed a realistic side of drugs and addiction... and yet the war on drugs has only intensified since their popular releases.
Saw the movie 20 years ago and remember enjoying it. Was better than I expected. We were “saving the world from communism”. We lost and communism didn’t take over the world.
Watching the Americans today reminds me of how we fought to save Afghanistan from the Russians. Now we’re there in our longest war.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Americans_(2013_TV_series)
Iraq ... we saved the Iraqi’s from Saddam. Libya from Gaddafi...
Personally, I think the Green Berets should be required watching with an additional history lesson to help us better reflect on our past and future choices.
Maybe someday we’ll stop trying to save the world, and quit repeating past mistakes.
I was hesitant to click on it due to my association of the song with the 1968 warmonger propaganda film “The Green Berets” (not John Wayne’s best work, IMO). But the story itself was not what I would have expected, so worth a read.
Why?
It's pretty well known that intelligence services and others placed female agents in positions to develop sexual relationships with men and women in order to get information and apply influence. Hell, US propaganda books and movies (The Green Berets) have featured women in this role as quasi-heroines.
I'm not asserting that the book is credible or not, I recall reading it a long time ago and honestly don't remember enough about it. But if the person is what he claimed to be, seems like the type of shenanigans that would take place.
I think John Wayne's The Green Berets is possibly the only movie that attempts to portray that particular war as "noble" (and I should add that I only know of that movie by reputation).
Apologies for answering your question with another question - but have their been any movies that were even distributed (let alone produced) in the West that try and given an account of the war from a North Vietnamese viewpoint?