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Cimino's tale may or may not be a bad description of what happened in Viet Nam; it depends on one's politics. It is the implication of American innocence that enrages some critics of the film. Partly the difficulty lies in trying to extrapolate a general statement of American performance in Viet Nam from the in dividual American stories that Cimino presents. The director, now working in Montana on a new film about the immigrant voyages west, speaks bitterly of Fon da's charges about his film. His characters, says Cimino, "are trying to support each...
...case, are only the beginning. Still to come is Francis Ford Coppola's long delayed $35 million Apocalypse Now, opening in August. Coppola has based the film on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Dark ness, translating the tale of savagery and evil from the Congo to Viet Nam. There, Marlon Brando, playing the Mr. Kurtz character, is a renegade Army colonel who has taken over a remote province and set up his own war against the Communists. Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) is sent to assassinate the rebellious Kurtz. The movie is already 1½ years behind its original...
...Friendly Fire, an ABC made-for-TV movie based on C.D.B. Bryan's 1976 nonfiction book (April 22, 8 p.m.). Carol Burnett and Ned Beatty play an Iowa farm couple who turn against the war when their son is killed by an errant U.S. artillery round in Viet Nam. As their anger grows more obsessive, they gradually alienate their lifelong friends and even their own family. In Bryan's book, the process is deeply moving, but the TV version is cluttered with cliches and civics lessons. The best TV show about the American involvement in Asia remains...
Playwright David Rabe's trilogy The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Sticks and Bones and Streamers, explored military brutalizations in the Viet Nam era. This week in Manhattan Actor Michael Moriarty is opening in David Berry's play G.R. Point, an equally brutal work about men doing graves registration duty in Viet Nam. Its refrain: "The 'Nam hasn't got any heroes. Dead is dumb, and dead in the 'Nam is the dumbest...
More and more examinations of the war are also being published. The best of the war novels and memoirs, in many ways, is Michael Herr's Dispatches (1977). Herr, who spent a year in Viet Nam covering the war for Esquire, writes prose that resembles some weapon the Pentagon developed especially for Viet Nam-hallucinatory, menacing, full of anxiety, death and a stunning, offhanded sort of accuracy. Herr is a writer with the talent of a smart bomb. Like James Webb in his fairly straightforward 1978 novel Fields of Fire, Herr is able to locate the thing inside...