Good Conduct

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

GO TELL THE SPARTANS

Directed by Ted Post

Screenplay by Wendell Mayes

This unpretentious movie about a group of American "advisers" in Viet Nam in 1964, before the war was thoroughly Americanized, has the virtues of its defects. It is understated, lacking in powerful dramatic incident and high human emotion, and rather flatly written and directed. As a result, it has about it a realistically antiheroic air that is rare enough in any movie about any war, and a grubby brutality that matches memories of the news film that came out of Southeast Asia in the '60s and did so much to disgust the nation with U.S. involvement there.

Burt Lancaster, who has been playing veteran soldiers since long before he became a veteran actor, is in command of the American detachment and in solid command of the best starring role he has had in years (he was, of course, superb as the dying patriarch, a character role in Bertolucci's sprawling 1900). Without the slightest fuss, he gives us a portrait of a dutybound professional whose soldierly instincts tell him that his duty this time is madness. Revolt is beyond his character, but disgust is not. Lancaster's presence, carrying with it the memory of other wars (and a different sort of war movie), provides a kind of bench mark against which to measure the distance we have traveled from our former attitudes about the military necessity.

His problems here are an ill-equipped and ill-motivated local soldiery (they go into battle carrying shotguns), the corruption of the local district leader, a high command that doesn't understand the nature of guerrilla warfare, and a less-than-inspiring crowd of American helpers. Among them: A sergeant whose gung-ho spirit has been burned out in the war. A lieutenant who moronically parrots--because he moronically believes--all the official rationales for the war, all the official ideas of how to conduct yourself on this dark and bloody ground. A sometime college student one suspects of having literary ambitions--he's looking for a war, any war, merely to experience it. These soldiers are mostly seen not as brutes, but as decent if limited men doing their best in an indecent situation.

Their job is to reoccupy and defend a former French outpost called Muc Wa, which they do successfully until there is an inexplicable change in strategy and they are forced to withdraw into ambush and massacre. The picture is good at catching the absurdity and futility of the operation, but in the long siege-and-retreat sequence, Director Post's failure to rise above simple realism becomes a problem. The scenes here should be spookier and more suspenseful, imparting a developing sense of the madness of isolation in an alien land where the native enemy has all the advantages of terrain and bred-in-the-bones knowledge of it. There are hints of an effort in this direction (Muc Wa contains a cemetery for the French troops who died trying to defend it, with an inscription about the Spartans at Thermopylae that provides the picture's title; there is a one-eyed Viet Cong sniper who appears and disappears in a ghostly fashion), but they are never really developed.

Still, Go Tell the Spartans is, within its limits, an earnest and honest little picture that goes against the escapist grain of movies at this moment. The gesture is probably as futile, commercially, as defending Muc Wa was militarily, but you have to applaud the bravery of the effort and issue some kind of citation to a film that, all told, celebrates unconsciously honorable conduct by individuals enlisted in a bad cause. And offers a lot of good acting in the supporting roles too. --Richard Schickel

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.