Word: nam
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...First Blood, the unappreciated Rambo was goaded into waging a one-man war against National Guardsmen in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest. In the sequel, after a stretch in prison, he moves from a surrogate Viet Nam to the real thing. At the request of his former commander (Richard Crenna), Rambo takes on a dangerous reconnaissance mission to search out MIAs in Viet Nam. Sure enough, he finds some in a supposedly deserted prison camp, guarded by sinister Vietnamese and their evil Soviet overlords. But his mission is sabotaged by the top military brass, who want to close...
Rambo seems to have perfectly articulated the nation's mood with regard to Viet Nam. "In general, the public feels that Viet Nam was a tragedy, an experience they don't want to repeat," says Stanley Karnow, author of Vietnam: A History. "But at the same time, there's an attempt to find some redeeming aspects in it. Movies can turn a defeat into victory; you can achieve in fantasy what you didn't achieve in reality." Says Arthur Egendorf, a clinical psychologist and author of Healing from the War: Trauma and Transformation After Vietnam: "Rambo is an effort...
Distance from the war has made such mythologizing possible. When Author David Morrell began shopping his 1972 novel First Blood around Hollywood, the political climate was quite different. Viet Nam movies of the late '70s, like Coming Home and Apocalypse Now, portrayed the war as a largely ignoble enterprise. "The subject matter was a risk," says Morrell. Such heavy Hollywood names as Martin Ritt, Sydney Pollack, Steve McQueen and John / Frankenheimer were involved in various efforts to film the novel. It finally wound up in the hands of two little-known producers, Andrew Vajna and Mario Kassar, who hired Stallone...
First Blood made $57 million at the box office, a substantial though not spectacular success. Since then the public's receptivity to tales that lend nobility to the Viet Nam War has grown. Films like Missing in Action and Uncommon Valor, both of them about missions to rescue American POWs in Viet Nam, drew big audiences. On TV, Viet Nam veterans, once portrayed as troubled loners, are now the sympathetic crime fighters of such hit shows as The A-Team and Magnum, P.I. First Blood scored unusually high ratings in a telecast on NBC last month, and orders for video...
...from Tarzan to Shane, and his Vietnamese and Soviet foes are updated versions of the malevolent Japanese and Germans from World War II films. The cheers that erupt in the theater as the body count soars are coming largely from young moviegoers whose only previous encounter with Viet Nam may have been a question on The Hollywood Squares. "The movie doesn't have a lot to do with Viet Nam and how we felt when we were there," says Josiah Bunting III, a Viet Nam veteran who is now president of Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. "It's impossible...