Vietnam on the Big Screen: How the Vietnam War Changed Hollywood

Vietnam War trauma shaped Hollywood as studios shifted from heroic narratives to films that sparked debate and reevaluated U.S. identity.

America, it is said, deals with its trauma through the medium of Hollywood, and few experiences have been more traumatic than its involvement in the Vietnam War. As the last US helicopters fled the American Embassy compound during the fall of Saigon, they left behind a country devastated by twenty years of death and destruction. They were heading back to a country that was damaged in a different way. The America that ended its involvement in Vietnam in 1975 was defeated, humiliated, divided and scarred. It was a bewildering transformation for a nation that considered itself to be on the right side of history. Only a generation earlier, Americans were united in celebrating the bravery of the GIs and Marines who stormed the beaches of Iwo Jima and Normandy. Now they were confronted with an uglier face of war: pointless sacrifice, disillusioned and mutinous soldiers, massacres of innocent civilians and the shooting of unarmed student protestors. For a long time America found it impossible to process the experience, until Hollywood led the way.

The movie industry had started out treating Vietnam like an extension of the Second World War. The gung-ho John Wayne action film The Green Berets (made with the full support of the Pentagon) had a simplistic "we're the good guys" message. However, as American casualties mounted in Vietnam, social unrest erupted and the war's aims looked ever murkier, the movie studios backed off. After The Green Berets in 1968 no major films were made about the conflict until the controversial and groundbreaking The Deer Hunter a decade later. The subject was deemed too hot to handle, although some brave filmmakers tackled it in roundabout ways ('Soldier Blue' was a re-telling of the My Lai massacre, set in the Old West).

Eventually, The Deer Hunter ripped off the sticking plaster and let daylight into the American experience in Vietnam. Its depiction of US soldiers as victims, not heroes, caused fights in movie theatres and led to questions in Congress. But it paved the way for the greatest run of war movies ever made. Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket and many more rewrote the grammar of combat films and helped a wounded nation come to terms with an unloved war.

This is the story of how those films got made, how they were received at the time and how they shaped the American experience of Vietnam. The names behind them are legends in the movie industry, from directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Kubrick and Michael Cimino to actors including John Wayne, Sylvester Stallone, Tom Cruise, Robert de Niro and Meryl Streep.