Newspaper reporter George Beckworth (David Janssen) thinks the U.S. has no business getting involved in the conflict in Vietnam, so Green Beret Colonel Mike Kirby (John Wayne) gives him a guided tour of the hell that is modern warfare.

CRITIQUE

I know I just used “hell” to describe warfare, but that’s not really appropriate when it comes to The Green Berets. As presented here, combat isn’t heck, much less hell. Rather than paying tribute to men in uniform by presenting a balanced, accurate look at the dangers they face and sacrifices they make, this movie makes war look no more dangerous or consequential than schoolyard play.

The Green Berets has been pilloried in the four decades since its release, and rightly so. It’s about as misguided, clichéd, and unintentionally funny as any single movie can be, and it’s so ineptly made that even those who share its political leanings (and you’d pretty much have to be a flag-waving fascist to do so) will likely find it hell to sit through. (Hey, I guess that word was appropriate after all.)

I must have been about eleven or twelve the first time I saw this movie, and I watched it only because I expected to see some stuff get blown up. Well, it took an awfully long time for something to finally get blown up, and an equally long time for something else to get blown up. This movie is long--way long--and overlong--way overlong.

Three directors--Wayne, Ray Kellogg, and an uncredited Mervyn LeRoy--worked on this thing, but not a one had a sense of pacing or editing; I’m not willing to verify it, but I’d wager there are more edits in Rope than there are in this movie. The characters in this movie spend more time walking than anything else, and every single step they take is shown is loving detail. But that’s not the half of it.

One character will announce where they’re all going and what they’re all going to do when they get there, meaning there’s no reason whatsoever to show them all going there; if we know where they are and where they’re going, why do we need to see the transitional phase? And every time a helicopter comes into a landing zone, someone will explain who’s on the chopper and why the chopper is coming in, after which there’s a long, unbroken shot of the chopper making its approach and finally touching down. They’re so lovingly photographed, at times it’s like watching some even weirder, even more fetishised version of Crash (the Cronenberg one, not the crappy one).

Kellogg was a longtime visual effects technician and Second Unit director, and he was brought in both to handle the combat sequences and ease the concerns of Warner Bros. execs, who didn’t want Wayne blowing the budget and creating another bomb the likes of The Alamo (to which this movie bears more than a passing resemblance), the actor’s directing debut. Kellogg’s specialty working Second Unit was action, but you wouldn’t know it from evidence presented here.

I found the combat scenes hard to follow--not because of the complexity of any given sequence, but instead because they’re so poorly staged and shot. It’s the same old story: Guys run this way, guys run that way, stuff blows up. There’s no clear spatial or geographical relationship between any of the elements, and individual shots aren’t assembled in any logical way. But these scenes are good for laughs.

The VC--who perhaps learned their combat techniques from the Indians in Wayne’s old westerns--have a tendency to stand in a straight line, thereby allowing the good guys to mow them down. Rather than being knocked down by the concussive force of an explosion, stuntmen quite obviously jump seconds after the explosion occurs. There’s a great scene in which a helicopter carrying Wayne is hit by enemy fire; the scene alternates between shots of a cheap miniature that’s almost completely engulfed in flames and a full-size mockup that’s barely even scorched. This chopper eventually crashes to the ground--the wire suspending it clearly in view--and explodes into a fireball, after which Wayne steps out, nary a scratch on him and only a single smudge on his cheek. Like I said, it ain’t even heck.

Most of the derision thrown this movie’s way is a result of its political stance. As hard as it may be to believe, The Green Berets is possibly even more jingoistic and black-and-white than the Wayne-starring flicks churned out during World War II. Here’s the gist of the movie’s argument: The VC are the enemies of the American way of life, so they, like every other practitioner of communism, deserve to be blown off the face of the Earth. Yes, it’s that simple. I understand that the movie was made before Vietnam became a full-blown political/cultural/social quagmire, but that’s still a laughably simplistic and misguided viewpoint.

And I suppose that Wayne and screenwriter James Lee Barrett (who adapted Robin Moore’s same-named novel) were completely unaware of the irony of arguing that anyone who adopts an ideology that runs counter to that of democracy and capitalism deserves to die when dictators, communist or otherwise, have favored eradicating opposing thought with a bullet.

But if you’re still not convinced of the movie’s awfulness, let me add that it also features a cute (read: annoying) little Vietnamese kid who is for some reason allowed to scurry amidst the Berets during firefights. And there’s a guy who keeps talking about how he’s about to rotate back to the States, so naturally he gets greased a few hours before he’s scheduled to leave. And there’s a guy who keeps talking about how he’d like to die in combat so he can have a building dedicated in his honor, and he gets his wish when a latrine is posthumously named after him.

Further, the movie was filmed at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, which looks about as much like the eastern half of Asia as it does the surface of the moon. The skies are always blue and cloud-free, there’s not a rice paddy in sight, and the vegetation consists of pine trees and oaks that are beginning to feel the onrush of fall; this thing looks like it was shot in the woods behind my house. (People mock Kubrick for shooting Full Metal Jacket in England, but at least he tried to camouflage it.)

Finally, there’s that infamous final shot, which features Wayne and that kid gazing out at the sun as it sets...in the East. Good grief. (Over the years some people have defended this last shot by arguing that the scene could take place on the western coast of Vietnam, but that’s bull. As is evidenced by every map featured in the movie, the story is clearly set in the eastern half of the country. But even these people haven’t come up with an explanation for why the setting switches from midday to dusk over the course of three seconds.)

THE VIDEO

I have to hand it to Warner Bros., because they’ve once again taken a catalog title and made people who claim older movies don’t benefit from high-def presentations eat their words. The 2.40:1/1080p transfer here--encoded with VC-1 onto a 50GB disc--looks pretty damned fantastic.

Yes, it has that tinge of softness you expect from a movie of this age, but it can be razor-sharp and surprisingly detailed at times (check out all of those Fort Benning soldiers dressed up as VC!), and color reproduction is spot-on. Some of the nighttime scenes can get a little murky, but that’s not unexpected. Speaking as someone who’s only seen the movie via television broadcasts, I’d have to say the image here is a revelation.

THE AUDIO

Warner chose not to remix the movie’s original mono soundtrack, so the primary audio option here is a Dolby TrueHD 1.0 track. Dated fidelity and thin, canned effects rule the day, and the low end is so muffled and weak it might as well not even be there. Dialogue sounds okay--just okay.

English, French, and Spanish Dolby Digital 1.0 tracks are also included; English SDH, French, and Spanish subtitles are available.

THE EXTRAS

The Moviemakers: The Making of The Green Berets (7 minutes, SD) is a vintage promotional featurette, likely created to introduce the movie to theater owners.

The only other extra is the movie’s hilarious theatrical trailer, which is also presented in standard-def.

FINAL THOUGHTS