ThingsAsianHollywood's Vietnam
Image © 1989 Gilbert Adair
Title: Hollywood's Vietnam. From The Green Berets to Full Metal Jacket.
Author: Gilbert Adair
Publisher: William Heinemann Ltd (1989)
ISBN: 0434045802
Details: paperback, 6" x 9", 227 pages.
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From the back cover:
During the two decades that separate John Wayne's The Green Berets from Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket the Vietnam War has been a source of inspiration to film-makers as distinct from one another as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Cimino and Oliver Stone. Hollywood's Vietnam focuses on over sixty feature films directly or indirectly motivated by the war and analyses a seismic shift in ideology from the consciously blinkered jingoism of the earliest works, through the Rambomania that surfaced in the Reaganite eighties, to the almost stoically acknowledged horrors of a film like Platoon.
Gilbert Adair, however, is not concerned merely to establish the chronology of a genre. Instead, he juxtaposes the films of the Vietnam experience with the constantly evolving currents of public opinion which they served both to foster and reflect.
Written with unfailing verve and insight, this revised, expanded and updated version of a book whose original edition was described by one English critic as 'a revelation of clarity and stylistic brio', is therefore not only for the confirmed movie buff but anyone who is interested in an era which has left an indelible mark on recent American history.
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