THE DUKE DUKES IT OUT WITH THE CONG.....AN UNHAPPY 50TH TO "THE GREEN BERETS"

The Green Berets (1968)    By the time John Wayne unveiled his vast, hawkish Vietnam War epic, at least half the country had already figured out that Vietnam was a ghastly horrorshow, an endless black hole with nothing even remotely resembling victory in sight........

                Wayne, who never served a single day in the military, saw the war through the warped prism of his old 1940's war movies.......and produced his film accordingly.......in its own way, "The Green Berets" is as much a filmmaker's phantasmagorical fantasy of Vietnam as "Apocalypse Now" and "Full Metal Jacket"..........they differ only in the worldview.....

                 Unfortunately, the politicians, strategists and generals in charge of running the war shared Wayne's straight ahead, World War 2 outlook.....all we had to do was drop enough bombs and kill enough Viet Cong to bash the commies into submission........and didn't that work out well....

                  You can evenly divide the movie into 3 separate acts.......Act I consists of Wayne and his familiar cohorts taking the audience on a grim tour of Cong atrocities......(unlike the lean, wiry youngsters who actually fought the war, Wayne's Green Beret army is comprised of aging, graying, overweight character actors - Wayne, Bruce Cabot, Aldo Ray etc, etc...)

                 The highlight of this section......the script forcing the mush-mouthed Ray. addressing a skeptical press corps, to compare the bloody chaos of the shifting South Vietnam governments to America' s squabbling 13 colonies, earning him applause...........yeah, right.

                  With Act II comes the film's signature set-piece, a lengthy nighttime firefight between Wayne's forces and wave after punishing wave of Cong and North Vietnamese regulars.

                 We doubt Wayne ever stopped to consider the astounding irony of this battle........it's literally the entire Vietnam debacle realized with precision.......with the Green Berets overwhelmed by endless hordes of true believers who care nothing about how many of their own lives they sacrifice.

                 (Incredibly, after all this carnage ensues, Wayne simply calls in an airborne massive machine gun to wipe out the invaders in less than a New York minute.  You have to wonder why nobody thought of this before the big battle broke out.....)

                We'll waste no time on Act III, a ludicrous comic-book adventure in which Wayne and company use a South Vietnam supermodel as a honeytrap to capture a Cong bigwig.  It's too stupid and corny to even discuss........

                 And we wouldn't even know where to begin with the many howlers throughout the movie.....the converted-to-the-cause reporter played by David Janssen, (as opposed to the real journalists who clued everybody in to the nightmare).....the little orphan who would suddenly speak in complete English when it came time for heartstring-pulling.......and of course, the now legendary, infamous final shot of Wayne and orphan-boy on the Asian coast, watching the sun set in the East....

              As we said......a demented fantasy.........that played well with heartland audiences even in the middle of the hellish year of 1968.  And wrong-headed, misguided and crazy though it is, for the BQ, we found it as compelling to watch as the post-war Vietnam films........2 stars (**)....who knows, Marlon Brando's obese Major Kurtz might have fit right in with Wayne's pot-bellied Berets.....