Plot
In 1964, Major Asa Barker, a weary veteran of World War II and the Korean War, is given command of a poorly manned US Army advisor outpost overlooking three villages in South Vietnam. He is ordered to reoccupy a nearby deserted hamlet named Muc Wa on the Da Nang-to-Phnom Penh highway where a massacre of French soldiers had occurred a decade before, during the First Indochina War. [2]
Barker and his executive officer, the career-oriented Captain Olivetti, order four replacements to accomplish the mission. Second Lieutenant Hamilton hopes that volunteering for Vietnam is an opportunity for promotion. Burnt-out Command Sergeant Major Oleozewski served with Barker in Korea, and has already done three tours in Vietnam. Corporal Abraham Lincoln is a combat medic and a drug addict. The fourth man mystifies Barker. Draftee Corporal Courcey is a demolitions expert who extended his enlistment by six months to serve in Vietnam. Barker sends the new men with Corporal Ackley, a communications expert, to garrison Muc Wa with a half-French, half-Vietnamese interpreter/interrogation specialist named Nguyen "Cowboy". A squad of Hmong mercenaries and twenty South Vietnamese Popular Force troops.
The group encounters a booby-trapped roadblock on the road to Muc Wa, and captures a lone Viet Cong soldier who refuses to divulge information and is killed by Cowboy. At the hamlet, Hamilton follows Oleozewski's advice so the unit can be resupplied by helicopter. Courcey discovers a graveyard containing 302 French soldiers killed by the Viet Minh. He translates a French inscription at the entrance as "Go, tell the Spartans, stranger passing by. That here, obedient to their laws, we lie" which references the Battle of Thermopylae. Courcey spots a one-eyed VC soldier scouting the area.
A patrol led by Courcey unexpectedly finds Vietnamese women and children despite intelligence denying the presence of civilians in the area. Lincoln is wounded that evening by a VC attack on Muc Wa and Courcey leads an ambush patrol that kills a VC mortar crew. One of the female civilians is among the dead. When Barker meets Colonel Minh, the regional military leader, in Saigon he requests three hundred ARVN troops for Muc Wa. Minh refuses, claiming the troops are needed to prevent a potential coup in Saigon. He then offers the reinforcements in exchange for 1,500 artillery shells.
Muc Wa is attacked again and Lieutenant Hamilton is killed after ignoring Oleonozski's warnings against trying to rescue a wounded man left behind by a combat patrol. Oleonozski commits suicide the next day. Barker requests withdrawing the US advisors from Muc Wa but General Harnitz refuses, and Barker reluctantly sends Olivetti to take command at Muc Wa. The outpost is hit again by an unexpectedly strong Viet Cong attack. Only the arrival of US helicopter gunships saves the outpost from being overrun.
Harnitz finally orders Barker to withdraw all American troops from Muc Wa, believed to be besieged by the 1,000-strong 507th Viet Cong battalion. The South Vietnamese and walking wounded are to be abandoned. Barker volunteers to stay and help evacuate these troops. Cowboy kills some Vietnamese civilians that Courcey brought into the base camp after they stole weapons and tried to escape. A teenage girl, who Courcey tried to befriend, escapes and informs the VC of the Americans' evacuation plans. Barker and Courcey begin the withdrawal after dark under cover of artillery fire. The group is ambushed and Barker is killed by the waiting VC, led by the teenage girl. A wounded Courcey, the only survivor, is hidden in bushes by an elderly militiaman.
The next day Courcey finds Barker and the South Vietnamese soldiers stripped of their uniforms and weapons. Courcey staggers into the French graveyard where he encounters the one-eyed VC scout. The badly wounded VC raises his rifle at Courcey, then drops it, exhausted. Courcey wanders out of the graveyard onto the dirt road leading away from the ruins of Muc Wa.
Production
Development
Director Ted Post persuaded Avco Embassy Pictures to produce the film on a limited budget. He sent the script to a friend of Burt Lancaster, then 65 years old, who was recuperating from a knee injury (his character limps throughout the film). [3] Calling the script brilliant, Lancaster agreed to star in it, and when the 31-day production budget ran short, he paid $150,000 to complete it. The younger actors cast were Marc Singer as infantry Captain Al Olivetti, a gung-ho career officer seeking to earn the Combat Infantryman Badge, and Craig Wasson as Corporal Courcey, the idealistic college-educated draftee who wants to see what a real war is like. [4]
Writing
The story was inspired by a futile 1964 special-forces operation at Tan Hoa in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, an objective that turned out to be an abandoned settlement containing only a field, an abandoned airstrip and three or four French gravestones. [5] The graves inspired the film's title, taken from Simonides's epitaph to the 300 soldiers killed in the Battle of Thermopylae against the Persians in 480 B.C.: "Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie." The film's name thus constitutes foreshadowing of the narrative arc, as the film's soldiers–like the Spartans at Thermopylae–are sent to their deaths.
The screenplay by Wendell Mayes was shopped around for years with various older leading men such as Robert Mitchum, William Holden and Paul Newman offered the role of Major Asa Barker. [5] The project was turned down by Paramount and 20th Century Fox. [6]
Unlike the elite US Army Special Forces of Ford's original novel, whom he called the "US Army Raiders", Mayes' screenplay of Military Assistance Advisory Group military advisors comprised a collection of misfits. A female reporter character in the novel was removed from the screenplay.
In 1977, the producers sought assistance from the U.S. Army, who responded that assistance would only be forthcoming if modifications to the script and characters were made. The Army response stated that its advisors to Vietnam in 1964 were "virtually all outstanding individuals, hand picked for their jobs, and quite experienced ... [I]n presenting an offhand collection of losers it is totally unrealistic of the Army in Vietnam in that period". [7]
Reception
Though the film had a limited release in the United States, critics, especially those opposed to the Vietnam War, praised it: "In sure, swift strokes", wrote Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in the Saturday Review , "it shows the irrelevance of the American presence in Vietnam, the corruption wrought by that irrelevance, and the fortuity, cruelty, and waste of an irrelevant war." Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic wrote in June 1978- 'This is the best film I've seen to date about the Vietnam War excepting two documentaries. [12] Roger Grooms, in the Cincinnati Enquirer , judged it to be "one of the noblest films, ever, about men in crisis". On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a score of 67 % based on 6 reviews. [13]
Over time, the previously overlooked film became an antiwar classic. At one of its revivals, it was described as:
A cult fave – and deservedly so – Go Tell the Spartans was hard-headed and brutally realistic about our dead-end presence in Vietnam; released the same year as Coming Home (United Artists) and The Deer Hunter (EMI Films released by Universal Pictures), the film won critical admiration, but audiences preferred individualised sagas, sentiment, and romantic melodrama. Rather than tackle the effects of the war on physically and emotionally wounded vets, this brave film exposed the fundamental, tactical lunacy of the war as perceived by an American officer (Burt Lancaster) who knows better, but must follow through on stupid, self-destructive orders from above. This is one of Lancaster's best performances: embittered, a cog in the military juggernaut, this good man foresees the killing waste to come. [14]
In 2023, film critic David Thomson wrote that the film "remains exemplary as a pitiless survey of an insane, inept, and criminal incursion on history." [15]
Awards and nominations
In 1979, Wendell Mayes' screenplay was nominated for the Writers Guild of America Award for "Best Drama Adapted from Another Medium (Screen)".
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