Toppping the list is THE DEER HUNTER from 1978 directed and co-written by Michael Cimino, starring Robert DeNiro, Meryl Streep, and Christopher Walken. This movie has received tremendous praise but also quite a lot of criticism. One thing is for sure: it could never be made today the way it was made in 1978. The first 45 minutes are devoted to a wedding. You have to sit through 45 minutes of wedding with no plot advancement at all. So, it couldn't be done today because it's too expensive to make movies, and modern audiences, which tend to be younger, wouldn't stand for it. They want short scenes, short dialogue, fast pace, and lots of action. They want the story to move!
Another complaint is that the Russian roulette element, which is so pivotal to the story, wasn't based on anything real; it was made up. But, I don't consider that a fault because it was used very effectively. When it jumped from the wedding in that small steel-worker town in Pennsylvania, tucked away high in the Allegheny Mountains, to the three buddies, now POWs in Vietnam, being forced to play Russian roulette, it felt real.
More than anything, for me, this was a story of friendship, and how the Vietnam War brought pain and loss to this little PA town half a world away. This movie, which started with a happy wedding, ends with a funeral, and when the close-knit group of friends are sitting around afterwards. trying to support each other, and they break into a sad rendition of God Bless America,, it was riveting. So despite everything, the movie worked; it got to me. I found it very moving, and of course, it could not have had better actors.
Also made in 1978 was COMING HOME, starring Jon Voight, Jane Fonda, and Bruce Dern. It wasn't the first time Jane Fonda played a woman torn between two men. In The Chase, which occurs in a small Texas town, her character is divided between her wealthy boyfriend, who is the son of the town's richest man, and her husband, played by Robert Redford, who is in prison but then breaks out. But, in Coming Home, her division is between her Marine husband (Dern) who is deployed in Vietnam, and this paraplegic Vietnam vet played by Jon Voight, whom she meets while volunteering at the hospital. This movie is more directly 'anti-war" than The Deer Hunter. Voight's character actually denounces the war, and at one point, in his wheelchair, he chains and padlocks himself to the gate of a recruitment center in order to keep recruits from entering. Much of the story centers on the budding romance between Voight's character and Fonda's, and how they try to have sex despite his handicap. Again, the emotions were so strong in this story, and even Bruce Dern's character was not without sympathy.
And finally, I shall mention the very first anti-war movie, made in 1930, just one year after the first talking movie, The Jazz Singer, and that is: All Quiet on the Western Front. This was an American movie, but it was a German story. It was based on a German novel. It's about several college boys, who, inspired by their professor to go off and "save the Fatherland" drop out of school to do that. It showed the horrors of trench fighting during World War 1 in gory detail. And in places, it directly confronts the insanity of the war. And it really was insane because one man, the Archduke Ferdinand, got assassinated in Sarayevo, and as a result, the whole world went to war and 45 million people were killed. Now, if that's not insane, what is? So you hear a German soldier say that, instead of a war, the Kaiser and the leaders of the other countries, should be stripped to their underwear and forced to fight it out with clubs. This is a very tragic story about three young men who find out the hard way that war is hell- on steroids. It has a very touching ending where this dying shoulder savors the beauty of a butterfly that rests on his arm in the last seconds of his life. He was played Lew Ayres, and when young Ginger Rogers saw the movie with her mother, she swore she was going to someday marry him, and she did! Sadly, the marriage didn't last.
I don't compare My Stretch of Texas Ground to any of these great movies, but I do think we succeeded to show the horror of war suddenly intruding on the peace and quiet of a small Texas town, being part of the "blowback." And, as far as I know, it is the first and only anti-war movie of the 21st century. So, until there is a better one, it will have to do.
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