Samuel Fuller (1912-1997) is best known for his three war films: Steel Helmet (1951), one of the first Hollywood movies about the Korean War; China Gate (1957), one of the first dealing with the French war in Indochina; and The Big Red One (1980), a semi-autobiographical World War II pic. Fuller served as an infantryman in North Africa and Europe with the First Infantry Division in the war.

Fuller was known for his low budget films and for including plenty of graphic violence in his war movies. That’s the case in China Gate, which he produced, wrote, and directed, and which recently was released in Blu-ray by Olive Films in DVD.

Set in northern Vietnam in 1954, the decidedly anti-communist movie tells the story of a Eurasian bar girl played by the heavily made-up Angie Dickinson (below) and her quest to get her half American son out of the country as the French are about to be defeated. To do so, she volunteers to lead a mission of French Legionairres (which includes her the father of her son who disavowed him because of his Asian features) to the China Gate after a French officer tells her that once they get there, he can smuggle the boy out of Vietnam.

“Passionately, urgently anti-racist,” New York Times critic Dave Kehr wrote, “the film features Caucasian actors in its two most prominent Asian roles. Appearing with Ms. Dickinson is Lee Van Cleef as a cruel and cynical Viet Minh officer.”

Gian Verderame, a student at Richard Stockton College in Pomona, New Jersey, is working on a  thesis titled “The Vietnam Film:  How Hollywood Shapes Our Perception of the  Vietnam War. ”

“The films that I will be analyzing are Coming Home, The Deer  Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, and Born on the Fourth of July,” he told us.  ”I’m trying to find primary sources on the subject and what is not a better way to go than to ask Vietnam vets.”

If you have any thoughts on these films and would like be share them for this academic paper, send an email to gianverderame@gmail.com

And please mention you read about it on The VVA Veteran’s Arts of War on the web page.

The latest home video version of Full Metal Jacket, the iconic, bombastic 1987 Stanley Kubrick Vietnam War film, is a two-disc 25th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray (Warner Home Video, 117 minutes, $34.99), which was released on August 7.

The two-disc set “offers some new insights into” the movie’s creation, a review in The Hollywood Reporter noted. The picture quality is “amazing,” the review said, “although not revelatory” since  ”the transfer is the same as the one that was released in the deluxe edition from a few years ago, and in the Stanley Kubrick Limited Edition Collection.”

The set contains a commentary track and a short documentary. The reviewer’s advice: “Rent for the documentary, or buy if you don’t own this already.”

You can read a compelling new interview with the author Bobbie Ann Mason on the Haunting Legacy Facebook page run by that book’s co-author Deborah Kalb. In the interview Mason—who received the VVA President’s Award for Excellence in the Arts at the 1989 National Convention— talks in depth about her excellent Vietnam War-themed novel, In Country, which was published to widespread critical and popular acclaim in 1985 and was made into a big Hollywood film in 1989 starring Emily Lloyd and Bruce Willis.

That book is set in Kentucky in the early-1980s when Mason wrote it. It centers on a teen-aged girl, Samantha Hughes, whose father was killed in the Vietnam War before she was born.

Sam Hughes, Mason says in the interview, “was in the first wave of the children of Vietnam vets who were coming of age and starting to ask questions.  That’s when I knew there was an important story, a timeless tale.  The search for the father.  Telemachus searching for Odysseus after the Trojan War.  This time it was Vietnam. And she was a girl.”

At first, Mason says, she was “intimidated by the challenge of writing about Vietnam.  After all, I hadn’t been there.  I didn’t even know anyone who had been there.  It took a long time of trial and error, of searching, to get into what it was about the war that left its marks on the family.”

Mason said she didn’t read any Vietnam War history books to prepare for writing the novel. “Mostly,” she says, “I read oral histories and memoirs. Several prominent memoirs and oral histories appeared in the early eighties, as the [Vietnam Veterans] Memorial was urged into being and veterans began to speak out. The voices in those books—such as Charlie Company, Everything We Had, and Mark Baker’s Nam—were riveting and alive. There was a common experience, a common language.  I could hear their voices as they reported their time in country. My Vietnam vet characters came alive in my imagination because of those eloquent voices telling about the hell they had been through. ”

Mason goes on to talk about how things have changed for Vietnam veterans in the last 25 years, the important role the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has in the book, and how she has been drawn to writing about the consequences of war in her work.

You can learn more about Bobbie Ann Mason and her work at her website.

Taylor Kitsch & Aaron Johnson as American drug dealers in 'Savages'

Oliver Stone’s new movie, “Savages,” a bombastic tale about the present-day drug trade between Mexico and the United States, came out last week to generally rave reviews.  ”‘Savages’ is Oliver Stone’s strongest work in years,” Ty Burr wrote in his Boston Globe review, “a stylish, violent, hallucinatory thriller with both a mean streak and a devilish sense of humor. It’s not at all for the faint of heart.”

That “not for the faint of heart” sentiment, which was repeated by other reviewers, should come as no surprise to anyone who knows Stone’s film work. The former 25th Infantry Division ground pounder in Vietnam has written and directed more than a few films in which he zeroes in on ultra-violent or otherwise sickening human behavior.

That includes his Oscar-winning screenplay for that great 1978 movie, “Midnight Express,” which was based on the true story of a young American trying to survive in a hellish Turkish prison.  Stone’s Vietnam War-influenced films,  ”Platoon” and “Born on the Fourth of July,” which he wrote and directed, also contain their share of eye-cringing moments. And then there’s “Natural Born Killers,” which definitely is not for the faint of heart.

Stone co-wrote the screenplay for the new movie, based on the best-selling novel by Don Wilslow, who also gets a screen-writing credit. Kenneth Turan, in his Los Angeles Times review praised the movie writing, but had caveats about Stone’s directing.

Oliver Stone in Vietnam in 1968

Stone “has often shown an affinity for ruthless people acting ruthlessly, and there’s a pulp side to his directing personality that meshes well with this self-consciously amoral story of a drug-dealing ménage à trois facing off against a rapacious Mexican cartel,” Turan wrote. “Leave the kids at home for this one. Please.”

Stone is a director, Turan said, “who has often felt that anything worth doing is worth overdoing, and his weakness for bloody excesses of all sorts undermines much of his good work. You might not think that a motion picture called ‘Savages’ could be too violent, too savage, but you would be wrong.”

The Siege of Firebase Gloria, a low-budget Vietnam War combat movie that came out early in 1989, has just been released in DVD in the MGM Limited Edition Collection series. The movie stars Lee Ermey as a Marine Sergeant Major in Vietnam who takes command of a remote firebase just before the 1968 Tet Offensive.

There’s plenty of battle action in this little-seen movie, including a good bit of hand-to-hand combat. Ermey holds to his Marine Drill Instructor persona as a hard-bitten NCO who sneers at the enemy and goads his men into an effective fighting force against great odds. Parts of the mayhem are played to the tune of the great rock song “Gloria” sung by Van Morrison and the group, Them.

Directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith, a Brit who’s know for mainly for his TV and straight-to-DVD work, the movie was produced by an Australian company, and was shot in the Philippines. It was not widely released in this country, and received virtually no reviews. The movie did get a lot of play in Australia.

Lee Ermey in the movie

Pierre Schoendoerffer, the French filmmaker whose work was strongly influenced by his French military service in Indochina from 1951-54, died March 14 in a Paris hospital.  Schoendoerffer, who was wounded in the French Indochina War and later captured and held prisoner for four months by the Vietminh after the disastrous Battle of Dien Bien Phu, was 83. He is pictured above left, after his release.

Schoendoerffer wrote a novel, The 317th Platoon, about the French war, which he made into a film in 1965 that he wrote and directed. He is perhaps best known in this country for the 1967 documentary, The Anderson Platoon, a close-up, in-the-field look at U.S. Army Lt. Joe Anderson and his men slogging it out in the field in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. First shown on French TV, then on CBS-TV, the documentary played in theaters in this country and received the 1968 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

His other main film was 1992′s Dien Bien Phu, a critically acclaimed, fictionalized look at the battle that was filmed  in Vietnam (although not at the actual site of the battle) and featured the travails of an American war correspondent. The $30-million epic, which used 10,000 Vietnamese soldiers as extras, was the first non-Asia movie to be made about the Indochina War in Vietnam.

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington today announced that twenty-five movies have been named to the LOC’s National Film Registry, which means they will be preserved in the Library as cultural, artistic, and historical treasures. The Registry now includes 575  movies of all stripes (feature films, documentaries, animation, shorts, and even home movies) made from 1912-1994 that have been deemed worthy of perpetual preservation.

This year’s group included Bambi, Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid, Silence of the Lambs, War of the Worlds, and one film with a strong Vietnam War theme-–Forrest Gump. That famed 1994 film starring Tom Hanks contains a short, but extremely realistic Vietnam War combat scene (the military technical adviser was Dale Dye, Hollywood’s best), and follows Gump and his severely wounded Lt. Dan (Gary Sinise, above right) through a series of post-war adventures.

Here’s what the official announcement had to say about the movie: “Forrest Gump is a guileless ‘everyman’ whose open-heartedness and sense of the unexpected unwittingly draws him into some of the most iconic events of the 1960s and 1970s. A smash hit, ‘Forrest Gump’ has been honored for its technological innovations (the digital insertion of Gump seamlessly into vintage archival footage), its resonance within the culture that has elevated Gump (and what he represents in terms of American innocence) to the status of folk hero, and its attempt to engage both playfully and seriously with contentious aspects of the era’s traumatic history. The film received six Academy Awards, including Best Picture.”