The Vietnam War cast a long shadow across one of the most fertile periods of American filmmaking and has led filmmakers for the half-century since to reckon with its complicated legacy.
These 10 films, assembled to mark the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, range from indelible anti-war classics to Vietnamese portraits of resistance, capturing the vastness of the war’s still-reverberating traumas.
The war was more than a decade in and some eight years from its conclusion when a 25-year-old Martin Scorsese made this six-minute short. In it, a man simply shaves himself before a sink and a mirror. After a few knicks and cuts, he doesn’t stop, continuing until his face is a bloody mess - a neat but gruesome metaphor to Vietnam.
A young girl (Lan Hương) searches for her family in the bombed-out ruins of Hanoi in Hải Ninh’s landmark of Vietnamese cinema. It’s a work of wartime propaganda (it begins with the intro: "honoring the heroes of Hanoi who defeated the American imperialist B-52 bombing raid”) but also of aching humanity. Set against the December 1972 bombing raids on Hanoi, "The Little Girl of Hanoi” is cinema made in the very midst of war.
Controversy greeted Peter Davis’ landmark documentary around its release, but time has only proved how soberly clear-eyed it was. Newsreel clips and homefront interviews are contrasted with the horrors on the ground in Vietnam in this penetrating examination of the gulf between American policy and Vietnamese reality. Its title comes from President Lyndon B. Johnson’s line, said when escalating the war, that "the ultimate victory will depend on the hearts and minds of the people who actually live out there.”
It's arguably the preeminent American film about the Vietnam War. No other movie more grandly or tragically charts the American evolution from innocence to disillusionment than Michael Cimino’s devastating epic about working-class friends (Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, John Savage) from a Pennsylvania steel town drafted into war. The final sing-along scene to "God Bless America,” after their lives have irrevocably changed, remains a powerfully poignant gut punch.
Francis Ford Coppola wagered everything he had on his masterpiece - and nearly lost it. "Apocalypse Now,” which transposes Joseph Conrad’s "Heart of Darkness” to the Vietnam War, is an epic of madness that teeters on the brink of hallucination. Shot in the Philippines and more faithful to Conrad than to Vietnam, "Apocalypse Now” doesn’t so much illuminate the chaos and moral confusion of the war as elevate it to grandiose nightmare.
The 1980s saw a wave of Hollywood films about Vietnam, including "First Blood,” "Hamburger Hill,” "Good Morning Vietnam,” "Casualties of War” and "Born on the Fourth of July.” Foremost among them is the Oscar best picture-winning "Platoon,” which Oliver Stone wrote based on his own experiences as an infantryman in Vietnam. Widely acclaimed for its realism, Stone’s film remains among the most intensely vivid and visceral dramatizations of the war.
Stanley Kubrick should be more often thought of as the supreme anti-war moviemaker. His devastating World War I film "Paths of Glory” and the subversive satire "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” are classics in their own right. "Full Metal Jacket” carries those films’ themes of dehumanization into an even more brutal place. Split between the harrowing boot-camp tyranny of R. Lee Ermey’s drill instructor and the urban violence of the 1968 Tet Offensive, "Full Metal Jacket” fuses both ends of the war machine.
How former soldiers lived with their experience in Vietnam has been a subject of many fine films, from Hal Ashby’s "Coming Home” (1978) to Spike Lee’s "Da 5 Bloods” (2020). In Werner Herzog’s nonfiction gem, he profiles the astonishing story of German-American pilot Dieter Dengler. In the film, which Herzog later remade as 2007’s "Rescue Dawn” with Christian Bale, Dengler recounts - and sometimes reenacts - his experience being shot down over Laos, being captured and tortured and then escaping into the jungle.
Not long after the turn of the century, former U.S. defense secretary and Vietnam War architect Robert S. McNamara sat for interviews with documentarian Errol Morris. The result is a chilling reflection on the thinking that led to one of American’s greatest follies. It’s not a mea culpa but a thornier and more disquieting rumination on how rationalized ideology can lead to the deaths of millions - and still not yield an apology. Of McNamara’s lessons, No. 1 is "empathize with the enemy.”
Steven Spielberg’s stirring film dramatizes The Washington Post’s 1971 publication of the Pentagon Papers, a collection of classified documents that chronicled America’s 20-year involvement in Southeast Asia. While government analyst Daniel Ellsberg (a moving participant in "Hearts and Minds”) could be considered the hero of this story, "The Post” turns its focus to Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep) and the wartime role of the Fourth Estate.
