Go Tell the Spartans (1978)

          Although precious few fiction films were made about the Vietnam War while it was still raging, the late ’70s produced a number of thoughtful pictures about the war’s history, impact, and legacy. Yet not all such movies were created equal. Compared to the other 1978 releases Coming Home and The Deer Hunter, for instance, Go Tell the Spartans feels old-fashioned, stylized, and even obsolete. After all, the picture is set in 1964, when U.S. involvement in Indochina was still limited to “military advisors,” so the whole film unfolds as a warning about the dangers and pointlessness of an expanded American role. Had this picture been made in the late ’60s, when the underlying material originated—Daniel Ford’s novel Incident at Muc Wa was published in 1967—Go Tell the Spartans could have been politically incendiary. Arriving three years after the end of the Vietnam War, the picture is elegiac but also something of an unnecessary told-ya-so lecture. This is not to say that Go Tell the Spartans is a weak picture. Quite to the contrary, it’s a brisk and powerful tragedy laced with dark humor and deep pathos. But timing is everything, and the moment for Go Tell the Spartans to influence public opinion passed long before the film was made.

          In any event, Burt Lancaster stars as Major Asa Barker, a lifelong Army man tasked with supervising military advisors in a violent section of South Vietnam. Barker is a cigar-chomping cynic who hates authority, and Lancaster invests the role with an endearing stripe of amused world-weariness. When Barker is ordered to establish a garrison around a seemingly insignificant village called Muc Wa, he sends a group of losers and misfits under the command of inexperienced Lieutenant Hamilton (Joe Unger). Also in the Muc Wa detachment are Sgt. Obleonowski (Johathan Goldsmith), an experienced NCO who’s struggling with battle fatigue, and Corporal Courcey (Craig Wasson), a principled draftee whose naïveté about military conflict fascinates Barker. The soldiers’ tenure in Muc Wa is fraught with unexpected hardships, and it soon becomes clear the village is dead center in the path of a massive North Vietnamese invasion force. Thus, the Army’s entanglement in Muc Wa becomes a metaphor representing America’s involvement in Vietnam—an unwinnable fight against an unstoppable enemy in unfamiliar terrain.

          Were it not for the script’s plentiful jokes, many of which Lancaster delivers with sublime charm, Go Tell the Spartans would feel impossibly schematic and strident. Further, much of the film is TV-sized instead of feature-sized, with director Ted Post obviously inhibited by a tight budget. Happily, interesting performances compensates for the meager production values: In addition to character actors David Clennon, Clyde Kusatsu, James Hong, and Dolph Sweet (all of whom deliver their usual crisp work), supporting players including Goldsmith, Watson, and Marc Singer contribute impassioned portrayals that underscore the film’s theme of war’s terrible human cost.

Go Tell the Spartans: GROOVY

The Choirboys (1977)

          The weirdness of this comedy-drama adapted from a Joseph Wambaugh novel about debauched L.A. police officers is epitomized by one particular scene. Hot-tempered redneck cop Roscoe Rules (Tim McIntire) wakes up by a pond in L.A.’s MacArthur Park after passing out from heavy drinking (the characters call their drunken revels “choir practice”). Roscoe looks down and discovers that a duck is, well, enjoying Roscoe’s private parts with its beak. All around Roscoe, his fellow officers bust out laughing. Turns out that practical-joke-loving cop Francis Tanaguchi (Clyde Kusatsu) found Roscoe drunk, opened Roscoe’s zipper, and laid a trail of breadcrumbs from the pond to Roscoe, thereby luring the frisky foul. Unspooling across 119 deranged minutes, The Choirboys zigzags wildly between sub-Animal House humor like the duck scene and horrific moments like the opening sequence, in which Roscoe taunts a potential suicide by shouting, “Go ahead and jump, bitch!” until she does exactly that.
          The theme of this wildly overstuffed ensemble picture seems to be that anything goes if you’re wearing a badge, so one storyline involves a sensitive cop (Perry King) who gets his kicks through S&M, while another follows a Vietnam vet (Don Stroud) perpetually on the edge of a complete meltdown. And then there’s the nerdy beat cop (James Woods) enlisted to entrap hookers because he looks like an accountant, and the fat slob named “Spermwhale” (Charles Durning), whose grudge match with his overbearing superior officer gets serious when the lieutenant threatens Spermwhale’s pension. Most of the storylines include some sort of raunchiness, like the cringe-inducing scene of a slow-witted cop sliding under a glass table to “kiss” the nether regions of a female officer sitting on the table, and the picture also has more than its share of physical and psychological violence. At one point, a mischievous vice cop (Vic Tayback) taunts Roscoe with put-on homosexual advances, triggering a gay-panic freakout in which Roscoe mercilessly pummels the vice cop until other officers intervene.
          What makes all of this so odd is that venerable director Robert Aldrich (The Dirty Dozen) exerts absolutely zero control over the movie’s tone. Pathetically sad moments are played for laughs, idiotically silly scenes are played straight, and the film’s sympathies seem to lie with its most depraved characters. The indescribably inappropriate music by Frank DeVol only accentuates the strangeness; DeVol’s sunny tunes punctuate sequences the way rimshots accompany a nightclub comic’s routine, though often with no apparent connection to the actual content of the sequences. Eventually, a plot of sorts emerges from the chaos, but even that is so distasteful as to seem utterly perplexing: The “heroes” scheme to cover up the accidental killing of the most sympathetic character in the movie. The Choirboys is loaded with colorful events and interesting actors, but it’s a sure sign of trouble when the never-subtle Burt Young, playing a disgusting vice cop named “Scuzzi,” gives the most disciplined performance in the movie.

The Choirboys: FREAKY