HANOI HILTON
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1987 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: This is a pretty credible story of POWs
held by the North Vietnamese. In spite of what has been read
into it, it is *not* a right-wing polemic defending the war.
It *is* a tribute to the courage and ingenuity of POWs in
defying their captors. As such it is one of the best films
about the Southeast Asia war. Rating: +2.
The film industry seems unsure how to show the Vietnam War in film. They want so desperately to please, but they are not sure what the buying public thinks of the war. When they think the public wants to see films that say the war was terrible, they make films like APOCALYPSE NOW. On the other hand, the audience that is into beefcake stars wants to feel we could have smeared the enemy, so they get films of macho stars either breaking out of POW camps or back in to rescue Americans still there. The poor film industry is aiming at a fragmented target of public opinion. But they sure know that it is public opinion they have to match. If they don't show the war exactly the way the public thinks of the war, it will cost them big bucks at the boxoffice. Hey, "if you want to deliver a message, send a telegram." That's the old adage of the film industry. No film about the war has shot so far wide of the public opinion mark as HANOI HILTON. You may remember it--it may have played a week at a theater near you.
HANOI HILTON is the story of the men interred in a POW camp in Hanoi. Most of the men believed in what they were doing. Perhaps they did not believe in the war, but they did believe in not being broken by their captors. The films paints the POWs as heroic, the captors as cruel, and the news and movie media as being dupes used by the Vietcong. None of that is too great a leap of imagination. There is nothing particularly hard to believe in the entire film. My understanding is that POWs endorse the film as being fairly realistic. The plot is not unusual or particularly new. It just shows how prisoners found ways to communicate with each other and support each other under interrogations that sometimes included torture. Again, nothing new for the cinema--there were similar films about World War II--but then POW camps probably have not changed that much either.
There has been some comment about how unfairly a visiting celebrity-- obviously intended to be Jane Fonda--is treated by the film. My personal belief is that Ms. Fonda was at this point a woman very committed to her ideals who had already been shown some of the destruction that air bombing had done in North Vietnam. That would have meant she had reason to be unsympathetic to the downed airmen and unsympathetic is all the film accuses her of being. A journalist earlier in the film is portrayed as much worse.
HANOI HILTON certainly appears to be a reasonably accurate portrayal of one aspect of the Vietnam War. In spite of a lot of unfavorable comment by other reviewers, I think it deserves a +2.
Mark R. Leeper
ihnp4!mtgzz!leeper
mtgzz!leeper@rutgers.rutgers.edu
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