A Look at Two Other Vietnam War Flicks

BY Trevor Strunk

Following feedback from the first part of our series on media and the Vietnam War, “The War on Film” in the July/August 2024 issue, here’s a brief look at two films readers brought to our attention: Marshall Thompson’s 1964 A Yank in Viet-Nam and Michael Cimino’s 1978 The Deer-Hunter.

Both films convey the themes we discussed, particularly the feeling that veterans of the Vietnam War were left with few people who understood their complex and traumatic experiences other than their comrades.

A Yank In Viet-Nam, in essence, the first American film about the Vietnam War, is difficult to evaluate today because it is not available anywhere. That doesn’t just mean that it isn’t available to stream or download. The film has never received an official release on VHS or DVD. Somewhere, a 35 mm cut surely exists, but outside the possibility of screenings at archival film festivals or specialized film collectors’ groups, the movie is effectively lost.

That said, the internet does have a collection of reviews of A Yank, that reflect a film that was a very typical Hollywood adventure flick and a considered defense of America’s involvement in South Vietnam Filmed in Saigon with only Thompson as a recognizable star, the movie seems to embrace a kind of cinéma verité spirit, feeling lived in and familiar because the cast and crew were familiar and connected with South Vietnam as they lived and served there.

It’s a shame that this movie is not available to watch easily, as its absence reflects the abandonment by history that the Vietnam War and its veterans suffer. Myth-making and narratives about a conflict are impossible to produce if the documents themselves are discarded.

Unlike A Yank in Vietnam, Michael Cimino’s three-hour epic is widely available, and most likely very familiar to Vietnam War veterans. A classic of American cinema, The Deer-Hunter feels very much like a tribute to novels like Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, a chronicling of a man’s life entangled with friends, family, romance, and tragedy with the backdrop of America in potential economic decline.

This is striking because much of the movie takes place in Vietnam. However, just as the scenes of Robert De Niro and his friends and family in rust-belt Pennsylvania are haunted by the war, so too are the traumatic and chaotic scenes of combat, capture, and torture haunted by memories of home.

This is another film that, in the vein of Dead Presidents, actually addresses the effects and the origins of PTSD. The climactic scene in which Christopher Walken’s character literally forgets himself before a “Rosebud” moment recalling the beginning of the film, only to then end his Russian Roulette career forever, is as poignant a commentary on trauma as ever recorded on American film.

Both movies speak to the lack of place that the Vietnam War grapples with, a sort of historical gap forced by the fact that the war and its veterans are portrayed and understood in art and media as more complex and flawed than veterans of the past. While this can produce great art, it is worth acknowledging that this art is tinged with pain and trauma, post-traumatic and otherwise, and it is imperative that, like these films, American audiences look at that trauma and understand it, instead of ignoring it.

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