In Searching for John Ford: A Life, biographer Joseph McBride described the director’s final film as “the most dismaying entry in the Ford filmography, a film that paints such a simplistic and often historically inaccurate view of America’s most controversial war that even the USIA [United States Information Agency] found it embarrassing.” Now you can see it for yourself.
Ford did not actually direct Vietnam! Vietnam!, but he served as executive producer on the 1971 production commissioned by the US government’s propaganda arm. McBride writes: “Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this little known episode of Ford’s life is that privately he had a highly skeptical view of the Vietnam War. After making two trips to Vietnam in the winter of 1968 and the spring of 1969, Ford wrote to his high school classmate Alnah Johnston, ‘What’s the war all about? Damned if I know. I haven’t the slightest idea what we’re doing there.’”
Eric Spiegelman was curious enough to seek out the barely released film. “Ford’s last documentary remained locked away in a vault for the next 27 years, when a change in the law allowed the National Archives to make it available to the public. I learned about the existence of Vietnam! Vietnam! three years ago. Curiosity led me to pull the ancient reels from the National Archives and have them digitized. Years of neglect badly damaged the audio portion of the first half of the film, and my cousin painstakingly restored the soundtrack to the best of his ability.”
You can watch the complete film at Spiegelman’s site Bus Your Own Tray. I’ve only managed to get five minutes into it, as Charlton Heston’s seemingly random narration (“The Beatles! Pope John! Dope! Black power!”) keeps lulling me to sleep, but die-hard Ford completists may fare better.