Go Tell the Spartans

Infobox_Film
name = Go Tell the Spartans


image_size = 215px
caption = theatrical poster
writer = Daniel Ford "(novel)"
Wendell Mayes
starring = Burt Lancaster Craig Wasson Marc Singer
director = Ted Post
producer = Allan F. Bodoh Mitchell Cannold
music = Dick Halligan
cinematography = Harry Stradling Jr.
editing = Millie Moore
distributor = Avco Embassy Pictures
released = June 14, fy|1978 "(U.S.)"
runtime = 114 mins.
language = English
country = United States
budget = $1.5 million
gross =
imdb_id = 0077617|

"Go Tell the Spartans" is a low-budget, critically-acclaimed 1978 American war film based on Daniel Ford's 1967 novel "Incident at Muc Wa", [Daniel Ford, "Incident at Muc Wa" (Doubleday, 1967) ISBN 0-595-08927-5] about U.S. Army military advisors at the beginning of the Vietnam War in 1964. The screenplay, by Wendell Mayes, was shopped around for years with various older leading men attached to it in the role of Major Asa Barker. Barker is a weary infantry veteran in his third war, who provides veteran supervision to a cadre of advisors attached to a group of South Vietnamese who garrison the deserted village of Muc Wa. ["Muc Wa" is 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 produce the film on a limited budget. He sent the script to a friend of Burt Lancaster, then 65 years old, who was recuperating from a knee injury – his Maj. Barker limps throughout the film. [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. A scene showing Lancaster getting shot was inserted to explain his limp.] 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 own 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. [Kate Buford, "Burt Lancaster" (Da Capo Press, 2000) ISBN 0-306-81019-0]

The film's title is from Simonides's epitaph to the three hundred soldiers who died fighting Persian invaders at Thermopylae, Greece: "Go tell the Spartans, passerby, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie."

Cast

Release and reception

"Go Tell the Spartans" was released in the United States on 14 June fy|1978. [IMDB [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077617/releaseinfo Release dates] ] It was re-released on 7 September fy|1987, and came out on video in the U.S. on 13 May fy|1992. [TCM [http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title.jsp?stid=76531&category=Misc%20Notes Misc notes] ]

Though the film had a limited release in the U.S., critics, especially those opposed to the Vietnam 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."

Over time, the film became an overlooked anti-war classic. 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. [Program notes at the Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center, May 2000]

In fy|1979, Wendell Mayes' screenplay was nominated for the Writers Guild of America Award for "Best Drama Adapted from Another Medium (Screen)". [IMDB [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077617/awards Awards] ]

Notes

External links

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* " [http://www.warbirdforum.com/lancaste.htm Go Tell the Spartans] " at Warbirdforum