CAIRO – Vietnam War films Shifting Focus(v) – According to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, “war films are a film genre concerned with warfare, usually about naval, air or land battles, sometimes focusing instead on prisoners of war (POWs), covert operations, military training or other related subjects. At times war films focus on daily military or civilian life in wartime without depicting battles. Their stories may be fiction, based on history, docudrama, biographical, or even alternate history fiction”. This applies to Vietnam War films where the focus was shifting considerably. Though trouble in Southeast Asia was shown in films like Jack L. Warner's Brushfire (1961), and Marshall Thompson's A Yank in Viet-nam (1964) and To the Shores of Hell (1966), the major Hollywood studios refused to make any Vietnam War films with the exception of John Wayne's The Green Berets based on the best-selling book by Robin Moore and using the theme song Ballad of the Green Berets. No Vietnam war films followed until Jack Starrett's Nam Angels AKA The Losers (1970) filmed on Philippine sets left over from Robert Aldrich's Too Late the Hero (also 1970). The effects of the Vietnam War tended to diminish the appetite for fictional war films by the turn of the 1970s. American war films produced during and just after the Vietnam War often reflected the disillusion of the American public towards the war. Most films made after the Vietnam War delved more deeply into the horrors of war than films made before it (This is not to say that there were no such films before the Vietnam War). Later war films like Catch-22 (set in WWII) and the black comedy MASH (set in Korea), reflected some of these attitudes. In the decades following the War, the American film industry produced many war films either critical of American involvement in Vietnam, depicting American war crimes or the negative effects of war on combatants. These films included works by the most prominent actors and directors in American film and garnering the highest accolades and commercial success.
