The Green Berets
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Actor: David Janssen, John WayneDVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; Spanish (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Letterboxed, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 142 minutes
DVD Release Date: 1997-10-29
Audience Rating: G (General Audience)
Studio: Warner Home Video
DVD Reviews of The Green Berets
DVD Review: Worthless
Summary: 1 Stars
This film is about what you would expect from a rabid
anti-communist draft dodger. Wayne avoided even phony
stateside service in WWII first by hiding behind his wife's
skirts and then by getting the government to give him a
deferment in the national interest. He often told lies
about an old football injury, but it was only a yellow streak
that kept him out of uniform.
This movie has nothing to do with the real war in vietnam.
Its a bunch of ideas strung together from what Wayne saw on
TV and what some of his officer groopies who never left Saigon
told him about the war.
The first half of the movie has a traitorous reporter (Cliff
Robertson) learn the real story of vietnam. He goes with Wayne
to vietnam to what is supposed to be a special forces jungle
camp on the vietnamese border. Its fort apache, vietnam after
that. Complete with noble slow-taking indian scouts (the
vietnamese), friendly indian tribes (the mongonards) and the
evil indians (the viet cong).
Being bad people, the viet cong kill, rape and rob everyone in
sight with Cliff Robertson seeing it all and learning to love
the war. Then we get to the big attack on the fort. Wayne
and company get to mow down wave-after-wave of evil vietnamese.
After a whole lot of people are dead, the reporter is convinced
of what a great struggle for freedom this is and promises to
support the war in his newspaper when he gets back to America.
The stupidity of it all is that the obvious question never gets
asked. Why, if we are fighting on the side of good and right,
is the enemy able to get so many people to fight and die?
Wayne would probably say that they were victims of commie
brainwashing.
The truth about vietnam is South Vietnam and its army were
weak, incompentent and not popular. Toward the early 70's,
they were more interested in making money off selling whores
and heroin to the US Army than in fighting for their own
country.
The only way for America to have won the war would have been
to expand it to a point where the Chinese would have entered
the war to save north vietnam which would have put us in the
same meat-grinder that Korea turned into.
What stupid people like Wayne never got was that you don't
send the US Army to save a country that can't and won't
defend itself. You send them weapons, not troops. If they
can't use the weapons and can't defend themselves, they were
never worth anything in the first place. And if the enemy
can inspire five people to die while you can't get even one
to stand and fight, something is really wrong.
The second half of the movie is interesting. Wayne's super
commandos are sent in to raid the Viet Cong's pentagon and
bring out some general. The Viet Cong HQ is a mansion with
silver tea services, servents, electricity and late model
staff cars. The plan is to whore out the sister of one of
their south vietnamese soldier-followers to the general, sneak
in and knock the general out, wake the guards starting a
firefight and then flee to safety in the General's staff car.
There is a great scene afterward where Wayne, American Pimp,
lectures his south vietnamese friend to get over pimping out
his sister for the war effort. American morality at its
finest. All that was missing was Wayne talking about how the
woman now had new career opporunties open to her in Saigon.
Here was a guy, John Wayne, who never had any guts in his whole
life making a flag-waving film about how everyone else should
send their kids off to die in vietnam. People talk lots about
patriotism, but being a patriot means actually doing something
and putting something at risk. Its not about making movies
pretending to be a hero when your a fat drunk sitting around
the pool eating steaks every night. He didn't join up in WWII,
he didn't send any of his kids to fight after. Thats not a patriot, thats a loud-mouth idiot. And he doesn't give a damn
about Vietnam or the people there. You can see in the movie
that all he really cares about is fighting the red menace in
the abstract. Wayne does his fighting across the bar and the
dinner table while less important people are supposed to go
beat the communists.
If you want a true hollywood hero, try Audie Murphy. He was
the real deal rather than the phony image John Wayne lived
off his whole life.
But really, most of America would rather be sold the phony
John Wayne image of solider than to honor, remember or even
care about the sort of real men who defend this country.
Description of The Green Berets
Anyone who fought in Vietnam can tell you that the war bore little resemblance to this propagandistic action film starring and codirected by John Wayne. But the film itself is not nearly as bad as its reputation would suggest; critics roasted its gung-ho politics while ignoring its merits as an exciting (if rather conventional and idealistic) war movie. Some notorious mistakes were made--in the final shot, the sun sets in the east!--and it's an awkward attempt to graft WWII heroics onto the Vietnam experience. But as the Duke's attempt to acknowledge the men who were fighting and dying overseas, it's a rousing film in which Wayne commands a regiment on a mission to kidnap a Viet Cong general. David Janssen plays a journalist who learns to understand Wayne's commitment to battling Communism, and Jim Hutton (Timothy's dad) plays an ill-fated soldier who adopts a Vietnamese orphan. --Jeff ShannonBestsellers in DVD
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