Suchergebnisse

As the French have assessed American military actions over the past three decades, they have done so within a framework of memories about the Vietnam War. This article considers French memories of that war by examining reactions to American films on Vietnam released in France from 1978 to 1987, from Coming Home and The Deer Hunter to Rambo II and Platoon. Drawing upon reviews from 30 French newspapers and magazines as well as box-office figures and quotes from viewers, it identifies and analyzes patterns in French reactions. It observes a far larger current of French support for America's war than normally acknowledged, while also noting disagreements among opponents of the war over whether the films expressed sufficient regret and evidence of lessons learned. Although still reluctant to debate their own colonial wars in those years, the French addressed the topic indirectly in discussing Hollywood's retrospective view of the Vietnam War.

AbstractThree important films reveal changing American attitudes toward the Cold War in Southeast Asia in the years of growing U.S. involvement there: Joseph Mankiewicz's The Quiet American (1958), George Englund's The Ugly American (1963), and John Wayne's The Green Berets (1968). All three feature idealistic American heroes fighting communism in Vietnam – and, in the later two films, fighting American ignorance and apathy as well. Using some two dozen reviews in a wide range of periodicals, including daily newspapers outside of New York and Los Angeles, this article finds a growing skepticism about the mythology of the Cold War in Vietnam. Critics in 1958 supported the mission of fighting communism and the methods outlined in the film, but knew little about Vietnam. In 1963, critics were more pessimistic about America's methods and prospects in Vietnam but still overwhelmingly supported the mission. By 1968, a collapse of America's Cold War consensus became obvious as critics panned The Green Berets, a remarkable box-office success, deriding the filmmaking but also rejecting the film's ideology and even questioning the struggle against communism. We thus see a fundamental erosion of American belief in its own Cold War mythology just as the country was venturing deeper into war in Southeast Asia.