Memories of the Vietnam War

Four years after the fall of Saigon, the Vietnam War has become the most important subject in American film. Just why is not clear, but certainly it is a phenomenon that invites suspicion as though, in a period of Jonestown massacres and Gary Gilmore executions, Vietnam was our long running, all-purpose horror story, the war we could always count on for one more turn of the screw. Yet the closer we look at 1978’s Vietnam films, especially the three most successful releases, Who’ll Stop the Rain, The Deer Hunter, and Coming Home, the more apparent it becomes that whatever their flaws—and the racism of The Deer Hunter is appalling—they have not made the war “show biz” nor turned their main concern, the Vietnam veteran’s return home, into an updated version of The Best Years of Our Lives. These are films that assume the war’s alienating effect on all who participated in it, and what makes them worth considering together is the perspective into which they put that alienation.

The bitterest and at the same time the most traditional of the three films is Karel Reisz’s Who’ll Stop the Rain, an adaptation of Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, the story of John Converse, a disillusioned Vietnam correspondent who agrees to smuggle three kilos of heroin back into the United States. The deliberately blurred opening scene of the film, in which what we hear is initially more important than what we see, sets the tone for the events that follow. It begins with a voice calmly calling out bombing coordinates, then suddenly we hear the same voice shout, “You’re too close,” and as the bombs go off, we glimpse a trembling John Converse (Michael Moriarty) curled up in a fetal position in a ditch. It is American firepower, not the Vietcong, that has nearly killed him, and for him it is the last straw. He decides to leave Vietnam.