Word: berets
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...also set up an academy of frontier skills. Hundreds of extras were made to practice skating for weeks. There were also courses in waltzing, horse and buggy handling, bullwhipping, and music for a band using instruments of the time. Kristofferson and Walken took handgun lessons from a former Green Beret weapons specialist. French Actress Isabelle Huppert (The Lacemaker) was installed in Wallace's real-life whorehouse for three days to learn the rituals over which she would preside in the film...
...America's Viet Nam adventure as a literal and metaphysical journey into madness. The literal journey is taken by Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), an officer who is commanded to travel upriver from Saigon to Cambodia. His mission is to assassinate Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a once exemplary Green Beret who has now gone crazy and set up a kingdom of murder in the darkest jungle. "There is no way to tell [Kurtz's] story without telling my own," Willard explains early on. Coppola apparently hoped that by dramatizing both Kurtz's and Willard's descents into...
Coppola appears to believe that if Kurtz soliloquizes about "horror" and "moral terror," the audience will think that the movie has actually dealt with these matters. But when Willard assassinates Kurtz, we still do not know why the Green Beret went mad, the genesis of his large cult or even the identity of the many gruesome corpses and severed heads that lie strewn about his domain. Nor do we know why Willard, a sudden convert to Kurtz's undefined cause, goes ahead and kills him. By withholding this information, Coppola gives up his final chance to confront the issues...
DIED. Colonel Arthur ("the Bull") Simons, 60, legendary veteran of World War II and the Viet Nam War, who was once described by an admiring John Wayne as someone who plays in "real life the role I play in the movies"; of a heart attack; in Dallas. Green Beret Commander Simons won the Distinguished Service Cross in 1970 after flawlessly leading a helicopter raid on a heavily guarded P.O.W. camp near Hanoi only to discover to his chagrin that there were no Americans there to be rescued. Last February the retired colonel led a more fruitful rescue mission on behalf...
Perot, who once tried to deliver Christmas presents and dinners to American P.O.W.s in North Viet Nam, says that he took matters into his own hands. As Perot tells the story, former Green Beret Colonel Arthur ("Bull") Simons, leader of the daring but unsuccessful raid on the Son Tay P.O.W. camp in North Viet Nam in 1970, agreed to lead a band of 14 volunteer commandos in an assault on the prison. After deciding that the unit was too small for the job, claims Perot, he arranged for a mob to do the job. There was indeed a prison break...