Word: viet
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...Viet Nam was thrust into the forefront of most Americans' consciousness last week in a surprising but somehow fitting manner: at the Academy Award presentations witnessed by an estimated 70 million TV viewers in the U.S. So it was movies and television again that brought the war back: the technological media of illusion fancifully reconstructing what was in some ways the most illusory experience in the national history...
...ceremonies in Los Angeles' Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, John Wayne himself came on. The old martial role model, looking gaunt but energetic, his stomach and one lung gone to cancer, presented the Oscar for Best Picture of 1978. It went to another Viet Nam movie, The Deer Hunter, Director Michael Cimino's story of young Ukrainian-American steelworkers from Clairton, Pa., who play pool, drink beer, watch football on TV, get drunk at a wedding, hunt deer and then go off to fight the war in 1972. It was the fifth Oscar for The Deer Hunter that night...
...FINALLY WINS. The awards to two films about Viet Nam suggested not so much that the academy has gone hot-headedly controversial as that it judged, like the rest of the nation, that Viet Nam has receded enough to keep any discussion of it from exploding into a civil...
...heat is by no means gone, of course. Outside the awards ceremonies, a remnant group of Viet Nam Veterans Against the War shouted protests about The Deer Hunter, which in style and message is a world away from Coming Home. The vets echoed the criticism of many old antiwar activists, who regard Cimino's cartoon treatment of the Vietnamese (played in the movie, incidentally, by Thais) as screaming sadists, much given to atrocity. Fonda called The Deer Hunter "a racist, Pentagon version of the war" -a judgment she reached without having seen the movie. Gloria Emerson, who covered...
...fascinating difference between the two films is that The Deer Hunter presents a version of the American experience in Viet Nam that is utterly at variance with the view, widely held among intellectuals, of barbarously overarmed Americans, a nation of William Galleys, doing battle against the frail, gentle, long-suffering Vietnamese. Cimino's victims are the rambunctious guys from Clairton, blue-collar heroes who took their wholesome patriotism to Viet Nam and there found themselves alone, morally adrift among savage Southeast Asian exotics who are forever forcing them to play Russian roulette. There is no record or recollection, incidentally...