Last Days in Vietnam

LAST DAYS IN VIETNAM               C+                  

USA  (98 mi)  2014  d:  Rory Kennedy               Official site

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, it is partly because that is the road they generally start out on.

—Stephen Garrard Post, from Altruism & Altruistic Love, 2002

Still one of the single most significant events of our lifetime, the Vietnam War was a powder keg of turmoil and discontent opening wounds of a divided nation where the rift may not have healed a half century later, as the whole world seemed to change in the failed attempts to stop the war.  What separated this from the two Great Wars was the lingering sense of ambiguity about why we were there in the first place, and the immediacy of the images that were broadcast into American households as the war dragged on throughout the decade of the 60’s and the early 70’s, longer than either of the Great Wars.  While battling tyranny had defined earlier military adventures, Vietnam was fraught with underlying questions from the outset, literally fracturing the conscience of the nation, coinciding with the US civil rights struggle in the 1960s, both epic struggles that brought the two races together, often in conflict, creating a turbulent decade of protests and social unrest.  The film doesn’t get into this ideological divide, or any of the moral questions surrounding the war, but instead focuses only upon a narrow point in history when America made its final exit from Vietnam. 

The events were precipitated by the Paris Peace Accords on January 27, 1973, when Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and his Vietnamese counterpart Lê Đức Thọ (who refused to accept the award) were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace prize, thought to be the end of a long and tortuous war, but the agreement was never ratified by the Senate and Congress never passed Nixon’s $722 million dollar request to withdraw the final 5,000 Americans and as many as 200,000 Vietnamese and their families, remaining a bone of contention for years to come.  However, relative peace was attained, where the fighting stopped, dividing Vietnam into two nations much like Korea, as the United States began withdrawing its troops while proclaiming “peace with honor.”  However, once the Watergate scandal deposed President Nixon from office in late 1974, the North Vietnamese seized the moment and sent troops streaming into South Vietnam by the spring of 1975 where they encountered little opposition.  America had no stomach for returning to war, but in Saigon, thousands of Americans remained, not only military personnel with their extensive weaponry and equipment, but government contractors, journalists, security and diplomatic staff, including the American Ambassador Graham Martin, who refused to believe that Saigon would fall.  Basically, this film documents events taking place on April 29th and 30th of 1975 once the North Vietnamese troops began entering the streets of the city, causing mass panic and hysteria from a forced emergency evacuation. 

The youngest daughter of Robert F. Kennedy, Rory Kennedy has made a career out of Sundance documentaries, the most recent of which was a portrait of her mother, ETHEL (2012), where this film is expected to air on the PBS show American Experience, and unfortunately that’s exactly what this feels like, an extremely old-fashioned approach for a modern era film, a throwback to one of those Time-Life History Channel specials that offers archival war footage, with conventional (almost exclusively white) talking heads offering their own firsthand commentary, a continuation of the old Walter Cronkite You Are There (1953 – 57) series on CBS (originating as a radio show), where the 60’s re-runs often coincided with news coverage of the Vietnam War, introduced with the obligatory introductory remarks, “All things are as they were then, except you…are... there!”  The film offers no new revelations or insight, no essayed commentary, but simply interweaves available footage of the final two days, assembling it in some coherent chronological order, attempting to offer a historical timeline.  Because of Ambassador Martin’s refusal to even discuss an evacuation plan, it actually began without his input, as others showed greater foresight, realizing how lengthy a process it would be, especially after the airport runways were shelled by the advancing troops, where the use of helicopters and their limited cargo space was the only remaining option in transporting people to awaiting offshore American ships.  The great unknown factor in all this was the number of Vietnamese who were promised they would be evacuated, as it ranged from official high level personnel to ordinary soldiers on the street making the same promises, where eventually it became a massive transport operation attempting to smuggle out as many lives as possible, leaving behind multitudes of South Vietnamese and subcontractors who were forced to face persecution and incarceration by the Communist regime, including “re-education” camps.

While an official evacuation was eventually ordered, not until bomb blasts were landing nearby as there were only about 24-hours left to complete the operation, where we learn it takes 8-hours to burn a million dollars.  Meanwhile various clandestine operations were already in play, shuttling people on military trucks to an American airbase outside Saigon, while at the same time embassy staff were picking up key collaborators all over Saigon, in each case dropping them off boarding ships departing for the Philippines.  With masses of people huddled on the embassy grounds, with many more swarming outside, eventually climbing the walls to get in, a helicopter airlift using 75 Marine helicopters evacuated people continuously for 18-hours in nonstop rotations to offshore American carriers waiting nearby.  To his credit, Ambassador Martin refused to leave until all that could possibly be evacuated had left, leaving only when ordered to do so by President Ford, along with the final detail of less than a dozen Marine guards.  Along with the official American evacuation were plenty of improvised last ditch measures, as some helicopters flown by South Vietnamese pilots were also bringing in escaping families to the decks of the American destroyer USS Kirk, where crew members are seen pushing the choppers overboard into the ocean to make room for the next incoming flight, including a harrowing scene of a Chinook helicopter too big to land on deck, so a child is dropped 30 feet out of the air into the arms of a waiting serviceman, while the pilot heroically ditches the chopper into the ocean, jumping out at the last minute, saving himself.  That child, six-years old at the time, now an adult, relates the story of her own survival.  Perhaps the most distinctive quality of the film is an endless sea of distraught Vietnamese faces onscreen, where as many as a million refugees swarmed to the American Embassy hoping to get out, most abandoned at the last minute with desperate mothers handing over their children into the waiting arms of soldiers, where their betrayal is the ultimate humiliation and shame of the country that calls itself the greatest nation on earth.  As opposed to the restored archival footage provided in the television series Vietnam in HD (2011 to present) that is largely narrated by American veterans and the press who covered the war on the ground, offering a more personal commentary, this film doesn’t really offer anything new, but instead condenses the available footage, much of it shown on cheap and blurry film stock, and simply reframes a familiar story.         

Network

NETWORK           A-                   

USA  (121 mi)  1976  d:  Sidney Lumet

We’ll wipe that fucking Disney right off the air.                 
—Max Schumaker (William Holden)                    

That Mao Tse-Tung Hour is turning into one big pain in the ass.  
—Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway)

“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!!”

—Howard Beale (Peter Finch)

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

—Arthur Jensen, corporate owner of the Network (Ned Beatty)

Paddy Chayefsky is the story of this movie, as this film lives and breathes every word he’s written in what is arguably one of the greatest screenplays in movie history (See Tim Dirks’ web evaluation here:  http://www.filmsite.org/101greatestscreenplays4.html), although Billy Wilder was no slouch.  Always smart and cleverly inventive, this is a cynically demented yet highly entertaining bleak apocalyptic vision that reveals how the television industry is destroying the human race.  This scathingly dark satire on the far-reaching global effects of television is brilliantly prophetic, as true today as it was when it was written, perhaps even more so because so much of what seemed like hare-brained economic hypotheses at the time are more in evidence today.  In short, this is a film about wacko sidewalk preachers who for generations have stood on soapboxes in the rain and cold, perhaps with a cheap microphone, passing out pamphlets, trying to scream the apocalyptic truths from the mountaintops, usually assured that no one would listen, until someone invented the perfect platform along with a voicebox called television.  Somehow, while the whole world watches, what passes for the truth in the world is what happens to be seen on TV, historic moments like the assassination and funeral service of President Kennedy, the subsequent murder of his assassin Lee Harvey Oswald captured on live TV, brutally violent photographic accounts bringing the war in Vietnam home to people’s living rooms along with the mounting demonstrations and protests against the war, the street clashes at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago which turned into a police riot, effectively ruining any Democrats chance of winning the Presidency, or live feeds of the first man on the moon, which many today still believe was concocted in a back room television studio somewhere.  This was the TV generation raised to see and hear the daily reports of history unravel on the 5 o’clock news as reported by the network confidant Walter Cronkite, who was as wise and likeable as a friendly grandfather sharing the world’s pain with each passing day, perhaps making it a little easier to bear.  This is the unseen and untold backdrop to NETWORK, which is simply one’s familiarity with television. 

The cast of the film is impeccable, all with worthy resumé’s of note, with 3 actors winning Academy Awards that year, a distinction it shares with only one other film A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), with a storyline that features a Billy Wilder-like SUNSET BLVD. (1950) narrator, perhaps in tribute.  The focus is on aging news anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch), a fellow of Edward R. Murrow in the glory days of television, but now a man whose ratings have fallen leaving the network no choice but to fire him.  Going out in style, he uses his last network appearance to announce his suicide on the air, suggesting that would jettison the ratings before railing against the hypocrisy in the world, like any good soapbox preacher, building up a healthy sense of righteous indignation on the air before signing off.  Behind the scenes, the television personnel are quick to pull the plug with that old standard cop out:  “Please stand by, as we are experiencing technical difficulties.”  William Holden as Max Schumacher is Beale’s best friend and the head of the News Division, who keeps Beale on the air for as long as possible, as every element of his crying anguish rings with truth, perhaps thinking it’s about time some of the network heads heard it head on.  However, in typical corporate fashion, heads will have to roll for this disastrous display of televising live an unconscionable moment.  Enter Faye Dunaway as Diana Christensen, a corporate climber with a near delirious addiction to good ratings, the life blood of the television industry, a behind-the-scenes Lady Macbeth wringing her hands with gleeful delight as someone gladly willing to step on her own grandmother in the pursuit of her own success.   Dunaway truly steals the movie with her manic joy at the chance to receive astounding ratings by broadcasting the mad ramblings of a lunatic on the air prophesizing his own gloom and doom, now himself the lead story on all the other networks and a front page news item, building a following of adoring fans who find every word he says filled with the unpredictable thrill of live television, staying tuned, wondering what craziness he’ll do next.   Diana’s mad hopes are realized as Beale becomes an overnight sensation, lighting up the airwaves with his mad rant “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more!” urging viewers to yell out their windows to spew their pent-up rage, becoming a modern day Messiah.   

Once more, Lumet has created a film with his pulse on the nation’s woes, like his previous work Dog Day Afternoon (1975), where one character carries upon his back the public outrage over unending racial strife, poverty, financial woes, urban blight, a crumbling government, a President resigning in disgrace, which subsequent President Gerald Ford just sweeps under the rug as if it never happened.  Like Al Pacino’s Sonny, Howard Beale bears the weight of the world’s ills on his shoulders.  His outrage and anger are a metaphor for the growing helplessness of those who see the world veering out of control, where even the right to vote can be ignored by as many as half the nation’s discouraged eligible voters.  But Beale is only part of the story, as this film does an excellent job stripping the veneer behind corporate excess, where behind the curtain in closed door suites are well financed billionaires pulling the levers of control not only of their giant tax-evading corporations, but also the nation’s newspapers, radio broadcasts and television airwaves, exerting a major political influence on their editorial content, shaping the view of the audience by manipulating them as they see fit.  In fact, this film itself is much like a giant full-length editorial, filled with plenty of screaming people who rant and rave over the deception of the truth through a neverending charade of lies and deceit.  The dialogue in this film is so rich with an excoriating venom of disgust over the outrageous hypocrisy of human deviousness, filled with a neverending stream of monologues that are not just devastating, but a screenplay that is overwhelming ambitious in scope, using a take no prisoners attitude while at the same time being presciently accurate, seeing the shape of the future before it happens.  Thirty or forty years later, the world very much resembles this demented vision of poorly vented outrage with steadily weakened, feeble-minded human beings who have lost all sense of power and individualism in the world except the right to vent their anger in a futile wrath of unending bitterness and disgust.  Whether this dark and scathing work is a cinema masterpiece is another story and still open to question, where the ALPHAVILLE (1965) like love story in the middle feels strangely out of place and has an eerily developing theatrical science fiction feel to it.  Despite being a work of fiction, this movie still plays like a documentary exposé filled with the bitter truths of living in today’s everchanging world.