The Talkies/Twenty Years Too Late
Podhoretz, John
not accompanied us to Leon. Without their careful guidance, the testimony on economic pluralism begins to unravel. While the businessman makes his case, his young U.S.-educated son stands...
...The moving and beautifully acted Uncommon Valor is far and away the best of the four, so it is not as if people were going to see these movies for the novelty...
...suggests he return to America and what will almost certainly be a full presidential pardon...
...matches arranged...
...And, with its typical ingenuity, Hollywood came up with a solution: It just requires our going back to Indochina in the 1980s and fighting the war over again, on a small scale to be sure, and getting it right for once...
...Just over a month after our return, the "travel seminar alumni" mailings begin...
...Much to the wonderment of everyone in Hollywood, Uncommon Valor was the thirdlargest hit of the season, making $70 million at the box office, in the spring of 1984, Chuck Norris's Missing in Action also proved to be a surprise monster hit, occasioning an extraordinarily rapid sequel, MIA H, in December 1984...
...Where are you going, Johnny...
...downstairs there are both the traditional Irish lounge (where women are tolerated) and bar (where they are not...
...As I write, Rambo is raking in about $25 million a week across the country, and should it continue at this pace it will end up as one of the most successful movies ever made...
...the human appetite for companionship and song satiated...
...A late afternoon meeting with progovernment Christian community leaders does little to lift our spirits...
...Our doubts are confirmed when we search for the bathroom and chance upon the servants' squalid living quarters...
...A refuge from the demands of a nagging wife and the ever-expanding State (much the same thing these days), the Irish public house remains a standard of normalcy in a most unnatural world...
...Only when the catastrophic and monstrous behavior Of the Communist regimes in Vietnam and Cambodia quieted some of the more vociferous voices on the left, and gave some leeway to nervous voices on the right, did the discussion really begin...
...Rambo is taken back to the camp and, significantly, is interrogated not by a Vietnamese, but by a Russian general...
...Ordinary by even ordinary standards, in its structure and ethos it is any bar anywhere in Ireland...
...What they like is the familiarity...
...I don't know," Rambo replies...
...The ruling is now in, as the hundreds of millions of dollars spent at the box office and the videocassette store on these movies now attest...
...divorce, people whose older siblings were weaned on fish-and-chips now congregate at McDonald's or Burger King, and the island's hierarchy has chimed in the general chorus of ecclesiastical babblings about Central America...
...His C.O...
...In Rambo, his C.O...
...the C.O...
...And with that, he walks into the Thai sunset, whence he will presumably be returned for First Blood Part IlL When Stallone made First Blood, Rambo's impassioned speech about the troubles of being a Vet was quite dramatic and stark...
...They are not well-educated, but they are powerful...
...If we were going to go in at all, we should have fought to win...
...Though my own brief existence here on earth has been marked by innumerable errors in judgment, I was at least fortunate that my initiation to the world of saloonery was consummated in a place of suitable taste and refinement...
...THE GREAT IRISH SALOON SERIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BRADY'S OF MAYNOOTH by William McGurn In an age whose dismal hallmark is an almost universal decline in standards, decent American men and women do not need to be reminded what this has meant to the Republic's saloons...
...So whatever wisdom was imparted to us during that formative year we owe less to the classroom than to our more informal academic pursuits at Brady's...
...In Leon, these remarkg ~ are the closest we come to the gritty facts of real people's lives...
...It is the fourth movie in three years to feature a story about a Vietnam veteran going back to Indochina to bring back some of those still listed as "missing in action...
...elections fixed...
...One letter remarks: "We have had special insight into the struggle and hope in Central America...
...This establishment goes by the honest name of "Brady's" and is located in the County Kildare village of Maynooth, a miserable hour's busride on the Number 66 from Dublin...
...To our surprise we learned that there in fact existed a Brady behind the name-Phillip Brady--who with his wife and family have been servicing the town of Maynooth for more than half a century...
...The Church falters, the Commonwealth crumbles, but by and large this man has barred the worst elements of our wretched century from his domain...
...While the businessman makes his case, his young U.S.-educated son stands by...
...And the tragedy is that had they made movies like this during the Johnson Administration (John Wayne's silly Green Berets doesn't count), perhaps those responsible for selling the war to the American people would have had enough confidence to make the case that was eventually made by the deaths of three million Indochinese...
...We must ask," he tells his primarily foreign audience of Americans and Europeans, "how do we become new people through the revolution and new people through Christ...
...the C.O...
...Our contingent doesn't belong among these fervent believers...
...For at the westernmost extremity of Europe, the same green isle that kept learning alive during the continent's Dark Ages has kept the lamp lit in our own...
...called Rambo: First Blood Part II, a hilariously lamebrained and preposterous Sylvester Stallone vehicle that improves on most other Stallone vehicles by keeping Sylvester's mouth almost entirely shut and his pectorals almost constantly flexing...
...loans extended and repaid...
...And that mistake was not involvement, it was defeat...
...joins him on the tarmac...
...The debate began in earnest only after the fall of Saigon in 1975...
...Bo Gritz, who led a widely publicized hunt through Laos for MIAs and POWs in 1981...
...By film's end, the town is a wreck, Rambo has made a passionate speech to his former C.O...
...We volunteer to pick cotton, to join the militias, to work in the Sandinista Defense Committees," says one of the middleclass Christian leaders, "because we believe we must offer an example, and because we see the revolution is addressing the problems of the poor...
...Theology, however, counsels that the only unforgivable sin is despair, and as usual even in these sorry times we are not without some measure of hope...
...But though public opinion demands answers, Washington wants the issue to die completely...
...I'm coming for you," he says, the camera in a tight closeup of his mouth...
...Rambo agrees, and wires Thailand...
...True, Ireland recently legalized contraception and is working on William McGurn is editorial features editor of the Wall Street Journal/ Europe and a European editor of The American Spectator...
...Upon arrival, Rambo destroys the fancy monitoring equipment at the base, beats up the bureaucrat, and lunges at him with a knife, implanting it finally not in the bureaucrat's chest, but right next to his head...
...The Russian, played by Steven Berkoff in the most hilariously overdone villain performance since Richard Lee's nasty "Jap" in every World War II film, tortures the magnificent Stallone body and threatens to stick a red-hot piece of iron in the MIA's eye unless Rambo gets on the radio and announces to the world that he is an American spy...
...Finally, the older man admits, "The educated people, the bourgeoisie, are constantly threatened as a class...
...This brilliant gambit is most powerfully demonstrated by an excrescence John Podhoretz is an editor and critic at the Washington Times...
...The priest who celebrates the mass is the unofficial leader of the pro-government "popular church...
...Then the son pipes up...
...Under his patient eye the daily needs of the Irishman are sorted out in a manner well befitting the appellation public house: Here local news is reported and digested...
...it was, in fact, the first time such a speech was made on screen...
...Murals depicting the FSLN flag and the party's founder, Carlos Fonseca, decorate the church wall...
...Upstairs can be found the modest Brady residence...
...Against this mounting clamor of foolishness, the Irish countryside has thrown up its one faithful soul, the noble publican...
...asks...
...First Blood had the Special Forces veteran wandering aimlessly through America and getting mistreated and roughed up by the populace of a small northwestern town...
...Finally, Rambo decides that he has had enough, and brings to bear on the town all of the skills he perfected in the jungles of Vietnam...
...And that is that the serious debate over the Vietnam war is now over...
...3ir, do we get to win this time...
...THE TALKIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . , . . ~ TWENTY YEARS TOO LATE by John Podhoretz It has long been a matter of discussion why Hollywood hasn't made more movies about Vietnam...
...The army is the new class...
...It is a powerful scene: Rambo shouting at the helicopter "Don't leave us here," the soldiers from the camp advancing upon them, the rickety, gangrenous MIA watching helplessly as his nation abandons him again in a cruel land...
...At the time of my introduction, 1 and several other American expats were registered at the local university, primarily known for its seminary, the country's largest...
...Those valiant holdouts from the ferns-and-lite-beer ethos grow fewer with every passing day, and decades from now scholars doubtless will link the phenomenon with the general enervating of America...
...Clad in tight designer jeans, aviator glasses clipped onto his Lacoste T-shirt, the son smirks at the irony of his father's tolerance for thegovernment's strict controls...
...The events of each movie are telegraphed at the beginning, and thus are rather predictable: Men tramp through the jungle, find a small crew of MIAs in prisoner-of-war camps, fight their way out, and get them home...
...Now, three years later, it sounds almost like self-pity...
...Don't you love your country...
...we won't advance this tropical revolution as a prophetic model for its Latin neighbors...
...As there were women in our group, most of our business was conducted in the lounge, our coats piled up high in front of the large window...
...We find Rambo on a chain gang, where he has been sent because of the transgressions he committed in First Blood, the 1982 movie to which Rambo is the sequel...
...There is in addition a small, somewhat hidden room where the select few might gather to enjoy their beverages after hours without upsetting the local constabulary...
...A message many of us return with is to 'tell the people and the government of the United States what you saw.' This is the time to do it...
...urgent messages deposited...
...business deals struck...
...These are Rambo's words at the beginning of the movie, and they are the film's most important...
...has come to spring him from jail to go back to Vietnam and do reconnaissance...
...The answer is simple: We lost, and a war movie about defeat is not something anybody wants to see...
...Then it's back to a presentation on post-revolutionary daycare, followed by refreshments at a former "bourgeois social club" rehabilitated into a "revolutionary discodiscotheque," and lunch at a restaurant cooperative run by reformed prostitutes...
...asks...
...So when Hollywood wanted to make a generic Vietnam war movie, i~ had to figure out just how to do it without getting bogged down in a defeat...
...I'd die for my country," Rambo replies...
...The evil bureaucrat in charge of the operation explains it to Rambo's C.O.: "Do you really want us to open that wound again...
...Public opinion (possibly generated by Uncommon Valor and Missing in Action, though this is left unstated) has demanded a complete accounting of our soldiers...
...But these Christians' strict adherence to Sandinista doctrine raises suspicions about their commitment to social justice...
...brawls instigated and put down...
...He asks to speak to the nasty bureaucrat...
...There the machinery for channeling newly inspired activism remains solidly in place, and will not soon be dislodged by a few hardened skeptics...
...cotton and coffee brigadistas troop to the microphone and express their enthusiasm for the revolutionary process...
...Far from being terrified of "another Vietnam," audiences seem to relish the sight of Americans back in Indochina correcting their past mistake...
...Their plots are almost identical, based largely on the exploits of former Green Beret Col...
...Bad as all but Uncommon Valor ar e , they tell us something about the American people and the Vietnam war...
...about how badly Americans have treated the Vietnam veterans, and is, Christlike, sent to jail for their sins...
...Rambo only shakes his head...
...But we soon discover that our peculiar reaction will have no impact on our tour's Minnesota headquarters...
...The first, Uncommon Valor, was released at Christmastime 1983 with almost no publicity and starring only Gene Hackman, who is far from a boxoffice draw these days...
...He is only to go in from their base of operations in Thailand, take photographs, and get out...
...Before then, those responsible for prosecuting the war never gave anyone a good reason for supporting it, while most of those responsible for coming up with policy, and writing about policy, had spent eleven years offering millions of reasons, some good, a lot bad, for opposing it...
...Today we attend a Catholic church service which Sara NelsonPallmeyer describes as a "campesino mass without any campesinos...
...Most urge lobbying at congressional district offices and participation in protests against the renewal of covert aid...
...We sit in our pews and wait for the signal that we'll depart for our dinner at a local restaurant...
...That has been the signal contribution of these four movies...
...Everybody loves the Vietnam veterans these days, and though no apologies have really been given to them for the years in which they were treated shabbily, even those who once denounced them can be heard sighing over Agent Orange or post-traumatic syndrome...
...The C.O...
...We only want our country to love us as much as we love it...
...So when Rambo (who has lost his camera in a mild contretemps with some pirates) takes one of the MIAs out of the camp 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1985 he has visited as evidence and proceeds with him to the point where he is to be picked up by helicopter, the bureaucrat tells the helicopter pilots not to land...
...The untrained eye, it must be said, would grant Brady's nary a second glance...
...During the homily's "dialogue" session, U.S...
...He then beats up the Russian and everybody else, gets all the MIAs, commandeers a helicopter, destroys a Russian helicopter gunboat, and proceeds back to base...
...The war movie is one of Hollywood's traditional pay-dirt boxoffice winners, and each war has its own kind of movie with its own kind of plot, made and remade and remade still again...
...The generic World War II movie, for example, is about a small band of men, from almost every conceivable ethnic group, battling what always appeared to be a better-armed, smarter, and terrifying enemy, and winning anyway...
...Then, almost turning toward the camera and directing his words to the audience, he speaks for every Vietnam veteran...
...Sunday...
...Cramped together on tan vinyl couches of dubious design and no comfort, we would take our drink and talk, a turf THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1985 27...
Vol. 18 • August 1985 • No. 8
