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No other Vietnam-inspired movies have had the Impact of The Killing Fields.MBy Desmond RyanKNT News WireTHMflhe tragic American experience in Vietnam yielded many macabre paradoxes. The movies have now added another one: Long after the war that Hollywood studiously ignored, the shooting has started on the screen.In one sense, it seems an impertinence to even mention such movies as last year's “Missing in Action and “Uncommon Valor” (1983) in the same breath as Roland Joffe s magnificent achievement in “The Killing Fields.” But for all the difference in quality, the three films mark a new stage in how the movies have coped with a national tragedy.The two American productions — “Uncommon Valor” and “Missing in Action ’ — are revenge films that speak to some pretty unsettling public attitudes. In them, righteous soldiers mount rescue expeditions to save comrades still held prisoner. In the process, hundreds of Vietnamese are slaughtered in scenes of ferocious carnage that were not possible or palatable when the war was tearing the United States apart.Joffe’s film, which is surely destined to take a high place with the great anti-war works, makes the two exploitation pieces seem like defective firecrackers. It has a vision of barbarity that is Dantean in its intensity and makes the destruction of a country a metaphor of the basest impulses of the soul arid the faint struggle against the forces of darkness that have overwhelmed our century.Until the arrival of this threesome, it was possible to neatly divide the way the movies have dealt with Vietnam With the exception of that woeful flag-waver “The Green Berets (1968), which was a box office failure that few people salut€*d,Hollywood passed on the war. When people were demonstrating in the streets, there was no way to put them in theater seats to watch a conventional war film. For the same reasons, there was no impulse to make films critical of the war When it was over, the postwar Vietnam film emerged. In such noteworthy achievements as Hal Ashby’s “Coming Home” and Michael Cimino’s “The Deer Hunter” — both released in the peaceful comfort of 1978 — the problems of the men who returned to nurse physical and psychological scars in an ungrateful and sometimes hostile country were the focus Their stance is pacific, and they harp not on military triumphs but personal pain.The postwar films of the late 70s are perhaps epitomized by Michael, the figure of Christlike redemptionplayed by Robert De Niro in “The Deer Hunter Heroism in such a war, Cimino s film argued, was not storming a machine gun emplace ment like Audie Murphy, who did it in real combat and then for the cameras. It was saving the life and sanity of your friends The theme is restated with immense power in “The Killing Fields with a New York Times correspondent coming to realize that he has sacrificed his Cambodian friend and interpreter on the altar of his ambition. His efforts, through the channels of international bureaucracy, are puny and the interpreter must save himself in one of the most harrowing journeys of survival ever committed to film.Joffe’s film has, to a remarkable extent, placed the story of a friendship against the larger canvas of war at a mindless level of savagery and managed to do justice to both elements. Its most stunning image finds the interpreter escaping from the Khmer Rouge and stumbling across a muddy rice paddy that turns into a mass grave where skeletons of men, women and children clutch at him. Rarely has the will to survivebeen given such a dolorous andshattering context.Although the reporter and his colleagues are pivotal to “The Killing Fields, its emotional center is provided by Haing S. Ngor, the real-life refugee who plays the intepreter. For once, in a film about the conflict in Southeast Asia, an Asian is a heroically conceived, rounded human being with a family, friends and values. This emphasis is vital to “The Killing Fields” because it has to deal with a Cambodia where mass murder is casual, and the people with the machine guns are sometimes barely into puberty.The drama of the escape offsets the entrenched notion that life is cheap in this part of the world. It is tn idea that war movies, going back to the kamikaze attacks on American carriers in World War II, have done their part to perpetuate “The Killing Fields,” with remarkable vividness and subtlety, rebuts that cumulative prejudice even as it makes one confront unspeakable suffering.The other two films simply en courage that prejudice. “Missing in Action’ is a Chuck Norris adventure with terrible acting equaled only by the depth of its racism.Ted Kotcheff’s “Uncommon Valor’ has the blessing of Gene Hackman s presence to give the proceedings a weight they would not otherwise deserve It is better made, but the political terrain is the same Hackman leads an expedition toSee VALOR’ Page G2
Newspaper Details
Colorado Springs Gazette
Colorado Springs, Colorado, US
Wed, Feb 13, 1985
Page 61
Full Page
Clipped by
Jon C.
NJ, USA 14 Jan 2020
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