Review Reviewed Work(s): hearts and minds by Bert Schneider and Peter Davis Review by: Peter Biskind Source: Cinéaste, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1975), pp. 31-32 Published by: Cineaste Publishers, Inc. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41685779 Accessed: 11-09-2019 15:10 UTC

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This content downloaded from 138.37.228.89 on Wed, 11 Sep 2019 15:10:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms the virtue of HEARTS AND MINDS that in a presumably descended from Ralph Waldo crazy-quilt of interviews, stock footage, vérité, Emerson, embody the very essence of New and film clips, it manages to breathe new life England rectitude, yet utter some of the film's Brn reviews into the worn out images of the war that passed sfllliest remarks. ("The strength of our system is from film to film until they became no longer that you can rely on President Nixon for shocking but comforting, like old friends orleadership.") Jhe mixture of foolishness, familiar faces. HEARTS AND MINDS contains intelligence, and pain in this sequence makes it the original footage of many of these scenes difficult to watch. which we only knew as tenth generation American rulers, monstrous as they appear shadows of themselves; they are invested here in the film, become less authors of a genocidal with a clarity and power that seemed to have culture than its agent, no better nor worse than been lost forever. One brief sequence shows an the people they rule. Nixon, speaking to a ARVN officer casually shooting a PRG suspect group of prosperous party regulars, congratu- in the head. Blood spurts out of the wound like lates the Christmas bombers, calling for a a geyser, and he falls over dead. Another shows "round of applause for the brave men who took Vietnamese children charred by napalm, burnt those B-52's in and did such a wonderful job." skin hanging from their bodies like rags. The Bereaved Vietnamese, mourning their dead, are film contains many such hallucinatory images followed by Westmoreland, tastefully attired in which bring it up short, crystallizing in some a seersucker sports jacket, opining that "the unspeakable moment of casual violence the Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life entire history of the war, shattering the as does the Westerner"; Eisenhower gives a composure of the medium in an instant of presidential welcome to dictator Diem and almost visceral pain. HEARTS AND MINDS explains, to the delight of future students of M ani rinds truly brings the war home. imperialism, that "if Indo-China goes ... the In the process, it reveals the furnishings of Produced by Bert Schneider and Peter Davis; tin and tungsten that we so value there, would this home to be shabby and mean, for its target directed by Peter Davis; research by Brennon cease coming"; Walt Rostow, unrepentent and is not only American policy in Vietnam, but Jones; cinematography by Richard Pearce; unmoved to this day, in an extraordinarily the American experience itself. It looks for the revealing moment of irritation with the edited by Lynzee Klingman and Susan Martin. sources of the war in the arrogant, violent, Color, 198 minutes. A Warner Bros, release. interviewer, discloses a depth of arrogance and hypocritical side of American culture. A stupidity not to be believed: "Are you really football coach in Niles, Ohio, revs up his team asking me that goddamn silly question?" Daniel HEARTS AND MINDS has come and gone. by invoking God and country; Hollywood films Ellsberg sums it all up when he says that Peter Davis, its director, and Bert Schneider, its like MY SON JOHN and OBJECTIVE BURMA "Truman lied . . . Eisenhower lied . . . Kennedy producer, have moved on to other films. provide strong doses of anti-communism lied and . . . Johnson lied . . . Nixon lied." Columbia Pictures, which financed the pro- racism ("You hideous yellow monsters"); an Answering their American counterparts, as duction and then dropped it like a hot potato, astonishing clip from a military musical it were, are the voices of the Vietnamese, raised has weathered the brief storm of bad publicity apparently called THIS IS THE ARMY reveals in sorrow and in anger. Vu Duc Vinh says: "My and returned to churning out Hollywood an American TRIUMPH OF THE WILL as eight year old daughter was killed and my three potboilers. Walt Rostow, who tried and failed choreographed by Busby Berkeley; a year former old son. Nixon murderer of civilians. What to prevent its distribution, has not been forced POW, Lt George Coker tells a group of have I done to Nixon so that he comes here and to join Martin Bormann in Argentina, despite parochial school kids that Vietnam would be abombs my country. I'll give you my daughter's the sorry figure he cuts in the film. He still lives pretty country if it weren't for the people. beautiful shirt. Throw the shirt in Nixon's face. comfortably in Austin, Texas, doubtless waiting 4 The people over there," he says, "are very Tell him she was only a little school girl." A to offer his services to some future admini- backward and very primitive, and they just woman, asked what her sister died of, replies stration anxious to prosecute a new war in Asia.make a mess out of everything"; George S. simply: "Bombs." Above all, they express a The shouting is over. What was it all about? Patton III pays tribute to his men after a determination to continue the struggle. A HEARTS AND MINDS is the Vietnam film religious service for dead G.I.'s: "My feelings Vietnamese carpenter who makes upwards of to end Vietnam films, a million dollar Vietnam for America just soared. They looked reverent 900 undersized coffins a week for Vietnamese spectacular. By deploying the vast resources and of determined at the same time- they 're a children poisoned by defoliants says: "No a major Hollywood production company, bloody good bunch of killers." Nor are matter how many decades America will fight, it wildly beyond anything imaginable by the sentiments like this confined to loonies like will never conquer Vietnam." anti-war film-makers who labored doggedly on Coker and Patton who can be written off as With its attention to the quality of their grainy black and white documentaries representing the worst of America. They American are culture, HEARTS AND MINDS during the 60's, it reveals the aspiration to have characteristic of the best, as well. Davis shows that the Vietnamese war was indeed a the last word, to get, finally, to the root of the interviews David and Mary Emerson of people's war, a war of the American people problem. Concord, Mass., whose Harvard-educated son against the Vietnamese people, a war which In this ambition, it partially succeeds. It is was killed in action. This handsome couple, until they became tired and frustrated, was

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This content downloaded from 138.37.228.89 on Wed, 11 Sep 2019 15:10:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms fully, if not enthusiastically, embraced by the ments of the peace movement is not only SORROW AND THE PITY, a compassionate great majority of Americans. This is an ungenerous and false to the facts, but plays into look at the commonplaces of everyday life that important lesson, if it shows us how deeply the hands of pop-historians and their more inspired the people of a large industrial nation embedded in our culture are the roots of serious academic allies who are energetically to follow their leaders in a war against a remote racism, sexism, and anti-communism, butrewriting it is the history of the 60's to prove that peasant society far from its shores. In this unproductive if it merely leads to the nothing really happened. Many radicals are attempt, it fails* and perhaps rightly so, for conclusion that Americans are just plain bad. strangely ready to write off their own political compassion without commitment leads to the This is a major flaw in the film. Lacking past, and refuse to recognize in the sneers and confused, paralyzed humanism of Ophuls' sufficient analysis of the imperialist policies jeers on of media gurus the self-serving message SENSE OF LOSS. Instead, Davis has given us which the war was based, HEARTS AND that people are powerless to change their lives, an American NIGHT AND FOG, angrier and MINDS fails to provide us with tools to dealthat militancy and determination are useless. less elegiac, but conveying, like Resnais' film on with the facts it so effectively drives home. In the course of threading its way through the German camps, an unrelenting nightmare of Although it attempts to suggest that we are the all labyrinth of the war, HEARTS AND civilized barbarism. victims of American culture, and tries to showMINDS finds some strange friends. Prominent us ourselves in the bizarre spectacle of aging among them is Clark Clifford, America's Albert Peter Biskind celebrants of American Independence frisking Speer. It is true that the demands of credibility about on the 4th of July in Ill-fitting and the importance of showing that disaffec- Revolutionary War uniforms, this Arbus-like tion from Washington's war policies extended vision of freaks and grotesques finally tran- to the higher reaches of the administration scends the particulars of the American ex- require the use of some figure like Clifford, but perience and implies that there is no remedy for the spectacle of this man, wrapped in a cloak of American savagery because there is no cause. virtue for his late-flowering repudiation of a The lesson that stares out at us from the war that was going badly, is hard to take. spiteful faces of American Legionnaires Moreover, and it strengthens the myth that the war DAR boosters is that these people are was cruel, the creation of the Nixon clique and a few fatuous, and dumb. But this is not true. crazy They generals, while Responsible' figures within did not make their culture, they were bornthe system into opposed it. it. They were conscripted into a war not Hostile their reviewers in the national media have own and made to like it. For this they been deserve quick to fault the film for its manipula- aim doesn't live not the contempt the film heaps upon tive, them, coercive style of editing. They have but compassion. Moreover, anti-communism charged that the film's point of view is "outside may be endemic to American culture, history." but it isIt is aloof from the events it presents; not an innate characteristic of human it beings, stands apart from them, judging and mreaipm American or otherwise. Rather, it inhabits condemning. our Even though Davis occasionally Produced by David Susskind and Audrey Maas; culture for a specific reason: to satisfy acknowledges the this within the film (a Viet- directed by Martin Scorsese; screenplay by requirements of an expansive American namese capital- man remarks: "First they bomb as Robert Getchell; cinematography by Kent L. ism, to supply an ideology which at once much as they please; then they film it"), the Wake ford; edited by Marcia Lucas. With Ellen provides an ethical justification for a particular criticism is well taken. Davis's approach is in Burstyn, Alfred Lutter, Kris Kristofferson, Billy economic system, persuades us that this system fact honey-combed with contradictions that Green Bush and Diane Ladd. Color, 113 is natural and inevitable, fosters a character have their source in the ambiguous relationship minutes. A Warner Bros, release. structure appropriate to this system and, between the bourgeois filmmaker and his or her finally, excludes alternative ways of organizing material. Not the least of these is the ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE human experience. exploitative element inherent in Davis's opened desire late last year to almost unanimously According to Davis, HEARTS AND MINDS to get to the heart of his material. rave As reviews, the not only as a witty and energetic has a psychological, rather than a political camera lingers on Daniel Ellsberg while film heby turnsthat rising young superstar director thrust, and consequently it detaches cultural away to conceal the tears evoked by Martin the BobbyScorsese, but also as a bold bastion of experience from its political and economic Kennedy assassination, I found myself the women's wishing lib ethic. Ms. magazine editorially context. But without this context, culture is for a cut that would have respected thanked the privacy Warner Brothers for treating us all with inexplicable, and the film falls back on facile of his grief. The same goes for the what intrusive they saw as a feminist breakthrough (for moral categories. HEARTS AND MINDS camera movements used to catch visible traces what it's worth, the National Kinney Corpor- anatomizes the culture of capitalism, but ofit pain on scores of Vietnamese faces. Is ation, the which owns Warners, has 25% controlling does not ask what interests this culture serves, ruthless determination to get-it-all-down-on- interest in Ms.). Pauline Kael called it "the first and therefore does not indicate what can be film, regardless of the cost, much different angry-young-woman movie." Nearly the entire done about it or, in fact, that anything fromcan be the morality of the war? 'critical community' has exhibited virtual done at all. It leads to a political dead-end. These On are serious flaws, but they should genuflection not toward this film, as if it would be the one hand, it indulges in an orgy of liberalobscure the fact that HEARTS AND MINDS is gauchely impolitic to speak out against what guilt which cannot but leave a sympathetic an achievement of no mean proportion. The has been broadcast as feminism's first penetra- audience paralyzed and sick. On the other, worst by that can be said about it is that it could tion into Hollywood's inner circle. dividing the world into good guys and bad have guys, been a whole lot better, that it opens itself Essentially, ALICE is only a slight variation into those who opposed the war and those up whoto criticism from bourgeois critics who are on the ancient Hollywood-romance theme. It's supported it, the film allows the former not satisfiedto until political issues are totally decked out in new-fangled colors, with fancier dissociate itself from American war crimes obfuscated by the oblique 'complexities' of camerawork,a and it has a verve and sense of ("that's not us") and the latter to turn Marceloff-in Ophuls. And that the film limits itshumor that few of its predecessors possessed. In anger at its contemptuous treatment of potentialmiddle audience by its self-righteous pos- the final analysis, however, the film stamps a America. Moreover, nowhere does HEARTS ture-which is a lot more serious. But for all its big OK on the same old tune, a melodious AND MINDS mention that the Vietnamese are shortcomings, it is a film that everyone should chorus with which most viewers can hum along communists. The Vietnamese struggle is see.sani- It contains probably the most horrendous in comfort: Ladies, get yourself a man! tized for American audiences; it is characterized compilation of war footage ever assembled The film has enormous possibilities. The as a fight for "freedom, independence, between and two pieces of leader, and for this alone Alice of the title (played by Ellen Burstyn) national unity." In refusing to say anything it deserves to be seen, to remind us once more leads a dreadfully dull existence in smalltown about communism, the film may indeed reach how inhumanea a war it really was. It is a film Soccoro, New Mexico, married to an ungrateful larger audience, but at the expense of deferring rich in images and details, like the shattered Coca-Cola truck-driver slob of a husband, to the very same cold war cultural phobias crockery it is amid the rubble of a bombed out attached only to her best friend who lives next at pains to attack. house, or the child's red sandals by the edge of door and her precocious if bratty 10 year-old At the same time that HEARTS AND a water-filled bomb crater, or the word "kill" son, Tommy, with whom she cavorts in slightly MINDS suppresses the political dimensions stencilled of on a G.I.'s flak jacket. conspiratorial gamesplaying. Then one day her the conflict in Vietnam, it slights the anti-war According to Davis, HEARTS AND MINDS husband gets killed in an accident on the forces at home. Failure to credit the achieve- aspired to be an American version of THE highway. Tossed out into the world by this

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