Word: wars
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...film on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Dark ness, translating the tale of savagery and evil from the Congo to Viet Nam. There, Marlon Brando, playing the Mr. Kurtz character, is a renegade Army colonel who has taken over a remote province and set up his own war against the Communists. Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) is sent to assassinate the rebellious Kurtz. The movie is already 1½ years behind its original release date and millions of dollars over budget. Coppola has gambled his own reputation and the considerable fortune he made from his Godfather movies on the film...
Television is attempting a Deer Hunter of its own: Friendly Fire, an ABC made-for-TV movie based on C.D.B. Bryan's 1976 nonfiction book (April 22, 8 p.m.). Carol Burnett and Ned Beatty play an Iowa farm couple who turn against the war when their son is killed by an errant U.S. artillery round in Viet Nam. As their anger grows more obsessive, they gradually alienate their lifelong friends and even their own family. In Bryan's book, the process is deeply moving, but the TV version is cluttered with cliches and civics lessons. The best...
More and more examinations of the war are also being published. The best of the war novels and memoirs, in many ways, is Michael Herr's Dispatches (1977). Herr, who spent a year in Viet Nam covering the war for Esquire, writes prose that resembles some weapon the Pentagon developed especially for Viet Nam-hallucinatory, menacing, full of anxiety, death and a stunning, offhanded sort of accuracy. Herr is a writer with the talent of a smart bomb. Like James Webb in his fairly straightforward 1978 novel Fields of Fire, Herr is able to locate the thing inside...
Philip Caputo's 1977 memoir, A Rumor of War, another excellent and painfully earned book, recalls how he was inspired by John Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you ..." Caputo joined the Marines: "Having known nothing but security, comfort, and peace, I hungered for danger, challenges, and violence." At the end of his three-year enlistment, Caputo writes, "I came home from the war with the curious feeling that I had grown older than my father, who was then 51 ... Once I had seen pigs eating napalm-charred corpses-a memorable sight, pigs eating...
...Zone. Josiah Bunting, a novelist (The Lionheads) and former Army officer who served in Viet Nam and is now president of Virginia's Hampden-Sydney College, points out an anomaly of Viet Nam. "The Norman Mailers and William Styrons and all those guys stayed at Harvard for this war. The real literary genius never went." Nonetheless, Bunting expects that "within the next three or five years, there will be a major, successful Catch-22-stylG novel and film about Viet Nam. Only then will we be far enough away so as to see behind the grotesque...