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Hanoi Hilton: Too True to Make It at the Box Office?
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11844 |
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THE ARTS
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8 / 1987 |
1,196 Words |
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Robert K. Dornan
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It is obvious the political Left in Hollywood is still feeling powerful pangs of guilt over the bloody aftermath of the Vietnam War. After actively seeking a North Vietnamese victory (euphemistically called American withdrawal), the Hollywood "liberals" now refuse to accept any responsibility for the slaughter that followed, and vilify as "right-wing fanatics" and "fascists" those who question the wisdom or motives of the anti-war faction. In this respect, Hollywood has much in common with America's self-anointed intelligentsia, which still refuses to accept the obvious immorality of its antiwar, or more accurately, pro-Hanoi position.
To perpetuate the myth that Vietnam was anything but the "noble cause" Ronald Reagan said it was, Hollywood has produced a string of movies that consistently put the war and our fighting men in the most unflattering light. Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Coming Home, and now the Academy Award-winning Platoon all depict our fighting men as neurotics, drug addicts, rapists, or murderers. It makes one wonder how, with armed forces like that, the United States managed to fight for two centuries without ever losing a significant military engagement.
Conventional Liberal Wisdom
In Hollywood, as in most places, if a lie is repeated often enough it is believed. Yet when confronted with a motion picture that contains nothing but the truth and that challenges, and mildly at that, the conventional liberal wisdom about Vietnam, Hollywood recoils in horror as most film critics shout "unclean." I am referring, of course, to The Hanoi Hilton, a film about American POW in North Vietnam's Hao Lo prison.
Written and directed by Lionel Chetwynd, the movie has generated a storm of rejection simply because the movie was, in the words of Good Morning, America's critic Joel Siegel, "politically on the wrong side." Variety called it a "right-wing tract," terming it "propaganda, pure and simple." Vincent Canby of the New York Times said the film was "no less narrow than Rambo" and was "racist, if only by default." New York magazine's David Denby complained that it represented "sour right-wing sophistries" and the LA Weekly termed it an "anti-red cheerleading session." (Why anticommunism is perceived negatively is something that has never been adequately explained to me. Maybe the LA Weekly could enlighten us as to what communism has done throughout sixty years of power to make it deserving of more favorable treatment.)
If the critics found technical fault with the film that would be one thing. But to take the actual experiences of American POWs in Vietnam and claim they are somehow not suitable subjects for the cinema is simply obscene. It is like a vicious smash in the face to every American POW. The presumptuousness of "liberal" film critics to judge the motives and patriotism of POWs who have served their country honorably is appalling. In a word: inexcusable.
I recently sponsored a special congressional screening of The Hanoi Hilton and was honored to have several POWs in attendance. During a break for members to vote, these former POWS told the audience of their experiences and added that everything they were viewing on the screen had really happened. In fact, they said that the torture scenes did not go nearly far enough in depicting the brutality to which the men were actually
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