Word: servicemen
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...Prohibition era, the Baja California town glittered as a south-of-the-border oasis for thirsty Hollywood movie stars and horseplayers at Agua Caliente Racetrack; Alex and Caesar Cardini invented Caesar salad one evening to feed the throngs at their beleaguered restaurant. But by World War II, U.S. servicemen in California came to know Tijuana as a bawdy border appendage of San Diego where sidewalk hustlers peddled a startling variety of sexual activities and mainstreet bars offered grinding nudes within tactile distance of the audience. The town's foul old jail became infamous as a place where unwary tourists...
...reports a battle with the Viet Cong as if it were a traditional football game ("They are the home team, you know"); four women members of the troupe do a song-and-dance about their liberation from service to the military men; folksinger Len Chandler leads the audience of servicemen and women in a handclapping rendition of "My Ass is Mine" or something with a similarly didactic title...
...example, a group of servicemen, in one "off-stage" sequence, squint through the camera lights as they try to outdo each other in telling Ms. Fonda how fucked-up the service already is. One soldier gripes to the camera as he stands quite conveniently in front of a Coke sign, another in front of an advertisement for Patton. A reading of largely symbolic demands by some servicemen at one base literally becomes a part of the night's performance. Even so, the show seems to have been a real outlet of grievances for Army personnel; the film, however, is closed...
...most interesting parts of the film comment on the staginess of the rest. In one sequence, a group of pro-war servicemen (I had begun to wonder just who was left to fight the war) heckle a performance, and, although they are soon removed by others in the audience, for a few minutes there is an actual dialogue--unrehearsed, unlike the virtual monologue of the rest of the show and the rhetoric of Fightin' Jane's familiar phrases. It is a moment when the tone and the punch-line aren't predetermined...
Military sources said that almost all of the servicemen currently being withdrawn from Vietnam are merely shifted to Thailand, from where they will continue flying warplanes in Indochina...