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radrians
Reviews
Don't Cry, It's Only Thunder (1982)
Movie is eerily similar to my own experience in Viet Nam
When I first saw this film I about fell out of my chair. Of all the films on Viet Nam, this one is the closest to my own experience during the war...I was trained as a medic, I was stationed near Tan Son Nhut, my unit was the same as the shoulder patch in the movie (USARV), and I worked closely with the orphanages in the Saigon area. The film was very accurate in costuming, the military lingo of the time, the depiction of the out-of-control black market, the lack of government support for the orphanages, the delayed booby trap of the hand grenade in the gas tank, and so on. I now have two copies of this film and there were about nine copies available on amazon.com the last time I checked. Only an independent co-production could have made such an accurate and controversial depiction of the rear area support environment of wartime Viet Nam. I know very few people, including Vietnam vets, who have seen this movie. The Philippines is an ideal place to shoot a Viet Nam film just as was Apocaplyse Now.
Home of the Brave (1949)
A very moving subject that was pushing the envelope regarding racism.
I saw this movie when I was in junior high school in New Jersey. There was a series called the "Million Dollar Movie" broadcast out of NYC. A classic movie would be run every day at the same time (afternoons) for a full week. When I saw this film, I would watch it every day after school. That was back in the mid-1950s. Today, I know what a watershed film this was. The subject of racism and PTSD (battle fatigue, then) took courage to portray during a time of the Army/McCarthy hearings and red-baiting of Hollywood screenwriters. Little did I know that ten years later I would end up in a another war (Viet Nam) that struggled with wholesale PTSD issues among the returning soldiers. It is interesting that Lloyd Bridges ended up on the Hollywood blacklist because of his past membership in the Communist party. Yet, what a great actor. Once the witch hunts dissipated, Bridges returned in the 1960s with his very popular TV series...Sea Hunt. I have been looking for a copy of Home of the Brave for a long time and have found it on eBay! R. Swain