Go Tell the Spartans
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| Go Tell the Spartans | |
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| Directed by | Ted Post |
| Produced by | Allan F. Bodoh Mitchell Cannold |
| Written by | Wendell Mayes |
| Starring | Burt Lancaster Craig Wasson Marc Singer Evan C. Kim Jonathan Goldsmith Dolph Sweet Joe Unger |
| Music by | Dick Halligan |
| Distributed by | Avco Embassy Pictures |
| Release date(s) | June 14, 1978 (USA) |
| Running time | 112 min. |
| Country |  United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $1.5 million |
| IMDb profile | |
Go Tell the Spartans is a low-budget, critically-acclaimed 1978 American war movie about U.S. Army military advisors at the 1964 beginning of the Vietnam War. It is based on Incident at Muc Wa[1], a 1967 novel by Daniel Ford. The screenplay, by Wendell Mayes, was shopped around for years with various older, Hollywood leading men cast as Major Asa Barker, U.S.A., a weary, two-war infantry veteran, then in his third war, who provides adult, i.e. veteran, supervision to a cadre of advisors to a group of South Vietnamese who garrison the deserted village Muc Wa; (a real Special Forces base in the Plain of Reeds, southern Vietnam; the name is pronounced "muc-hwa", but spelled "Muc Hoa").
Director Ted Post persuaded Avco Embassy Pictures to cheaply produce the film. He sent the script to friend Burt Lancaster, then 65 years old, who was recuperating from a knee injury; his Maj. Barker limps throughout the story. Calling the script brilliant, Lancaster agreed to star in it, and, when the 31-day production budget ran short, he paid $150,000 from his pocket to complete it. The younger actors cast were Marc Singer as infantry Captain Mark Olivetti, a gung-ho career officer seeking to earn the Combat Infantryman Badge, and Craig Wasson as Corporal Courcey, the idealistic college-educated draftee who wants to see what a real war is like.[2]
The film's title is from Simonides's epitaph to the three hundred soldiers who died fighting Persian invaders at Thermopylae, Greece: Go, stranger, and tell the Spartans that we lie here in obedience to their laws. (The more widely known version is "Go tell the Spartans, passerby, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.")
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[edit] Reception
Though the film had a limited release in the U.S., critics, especially those against the war, praised it: "In sure, swift strokes," wrote Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in the Saturday Review, "it shows the irrelevance of the American presence in Vietnam, the corruption wrought by that irrelevance, and the fortuity, cruelty, and waste of an irrelevant war." Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic found it "the best film I've seen about the Vietnam War." More broadly, Roger Grooms in The Cincinnati Enquirer judged it to be "one of the noblest films, ever, about men in crisis." Wendell Mayes received the 1978 Writers Guild of America award for the his screenplay of Go Tell the Spartans.
Over time, this film became an overlooked anti-war classic movie. At one of its revivals, it was described as: "A cult fave — and deservedly so — Go Tell the Spartans was hard-headed and brutally realistic about our dead-end presence in Vietnam; released the same year as Coming Home and The Deer Hunter, the film won critical admiration, but audiences preferred individualised sagas, sentiment, and romantic melodrama. Rather than tackle the effects of the war on physically and emotionally wounded vets, this brave film exposed the fundamental, tactical lunacy of the war as perceived by an American officer (Burt Lancaster) who knows better, but must follow through on stupid, self-destructive orders from above. This is one of Lancaster's best performances: embittered, a cog in the military juggernaut, this good man foresees the killing waste to come." "[3]
[edit] Trivia
This is the second film where Lancaster was bedeviled by knee troubles. In John Frankenheimer's The Train, Lancaster injured himself playing golf on a day off from filming. An explanatory scene was created about his limp.
[edit] External links
[edit] Notes
- ^ Daniel Ford, Incident at Muc Wa (Doubleday, 1967) ISBN 0-595-08927-5
- ^ Kate Buford, Burt Lancaster (Da Capo Press, 2000) ISBN 0-306-81019-0
- ^ Program notes at the Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center, May 2000
