Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Feb. 3, 1978)
(Again) ByJacoba Atlas War may be Hell, but to Hollywood it has been the nearest thing to box-office Heaven. War movies bolstered morale, explained strategy, rallied idealism and generally served The Cause. They also made people rich. War movies are a capitalist’s dream, and like detective movies, the western and the musical, war movies are an American specialty. Other countries can and do make war movies, but the genre’s perfection came from the U.S. of A., perhaps be cause during both World Wars, we stayed clear of the action long enough to turn our resources to movies rather than the military. Then, a decade ago, after more than 50 years of successful box-office battle, Hollywood in the sixties gave a war and no one came. The film generation, that celluloid-happy audi ence demographically between the magic ages 18-30, wasn’t interested in waving the flag, except in protest. As the Viet Nam war escalated, the market for war films diminished. It became impossible to use the traditional guidelines of good guys and bad guys, and unless those battle lines could be drawn, there was no way of making a commercial hit. The country was politically and morally divided about Viet Nam, and that made all wars suspect. Hollywood re sponded to this ambiguity by taking its usual affirmative stand: it ignored the subject completely. Except for one or two films made during the Sixties, such as Alice’s Restaurant, the industry pretended the war didn’t exist. A few forays into student protest, such as the disastrous Getting Straight or The Strawberry Statement, told Hollywood pundits that student un rest and revolution weren’t box-office dynamite, and what ever creative impulse might have led filmmakers to come to terms with the fundamental issues pulling America apart during the Sixties and early Seventies was nipped in the bud. But war is once again in bloom, with studios putting up big dollars hoping for big revenues. Perhaps the time is right, we’re safe enough now to open old wounds; maybe it is simply impossible to look the other way any longer. Or perhaps there is another, more cynical modus operandi: war movies offer a great storehouse of material, and Hollywood is desperate for good scripts. War is intrinsically dramauc, exciting, danger ous, heroic even in the most ambiguous situations. A writer needs very little imagination to write a powerful war movie; men in crisis write their own sagas, as Irwin Shaw (The Young Lions) and James Jones (From Here to Eternity) have said on more than one occasion. It’s easy to understand the appeal of World War II. This war still remains the only recent conflict where there were clear-cut issues and easily defined heroes and villains. In terestingly enough though, this black and white dichotomy is only true for Americans: European filmmakers, those born and raised during the rise of Fascism, are now exploring their past with the same trepidation our filmmakers are showing Viet Nam. However, for American filmmakers World War II is still the War of Wars. But the impulse to investigate Viet Nam springs from the much more elusive effort to come to grips with our country’s recent traumatic history. Although Viet Nam films will no doubt offer as much blood and guts as their World War II counterparts, it will be impossible, even for a film like Francis Coppola’s epic Apocalypse Now, to couch the brutality of the war in glamour and romance — two commodities totally missing from this Asian encounter. Viet Nam still divides this country; the publishing world can testify to the lack of dollars for war tomes. Such books may win awards, but today they rarely fill best-selling lists. The Viet Nam war has not produced popular novelists such as James Jones, Norman Mailer or Irwin Shaw and such admirable recent works as A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo do only reasonably well; not nearly well enough. It’s doubtful the great American populace wants to spend its hard-earned money reliving the war, but American movie makers may not give them a choice. The great fear in Hollywood is a battle-backlash, a boycott of the very subject matter which currently grips some of Hol lywood’s best filmmakers. This situation is unique: usually movies strive to reflect the mood of America, not create it. It’s apparent America’s mood does not relish reflecting on war, so Hollywood is gambling with films which treat Viet Nam seri ously. Filmmakers are betting they can shake America out of its apathy and force us to take a long look at troubled times. If Hollywood succeeds, it’ll be one of the few times the industry has taken a strong political stand against the economic pres sures of the profit motive. Any discussion of Viet Nam movies must begin with Fran cis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. The script was written in 1969 by a very young, very confused John Milius and bounced around the studios for almost five years. The original version is filled with adolescent battle fantasies about the end of the world and the nature of evil, so much so that one studio executive called it Infantile. Coppola saw something else
