Green Berets (Limited Edition CD Soundtrack)
Sound:
B Music: B-
Let’s
face it, though it was a hit in its time for reasons of people not knowing what
to think of the Vietnam fiasco, John Wayne’s
self-directed The Green Berets
(1968) is not a good film and has problems beyond what was intended to be a
pro-Vietnam presence film. Like the
recently reviewed DVD of Wayne’s 1940 howler Three Faces West, which was supposed to be the anti-Nazi story
about refugees coming to America to integrate with Wayne’s help, this film
instead degenerates into the Wayne film formula that has hurt his credibility
as much as any of his politics. This
includes wall to wall clichés and his patented down-to-earth persona that just
kills so many of his films.
Even if Green Berets is a directorial,
screenplay and logical mess, there is the music by Miklos Rozsa, now issued for
the first time ever as a soundtrack.
This latest scoop form the FSM label of Film Score Monthly Magazine
offers a loaded 31 tracks that fill almost the entire single CD here. Though we will not review the film much
further until we decide to look at the DVD, like Wayne’s helming of The Alamo (1960), historical
inaccuracies galore reign, but at least that film was a majestic 70mm
production that was more effective despite its many mistakes.
Outside
of the problematic film, the music gets to stand alone without the distraction
of the pictures many problems. Not
having seen the film for a while, which is very forgettable and drags on like
crazy, I honestly could not remember the scenes the tracks went to. That was good, though the title song, a
remake of the infamous hit by Barry Sadler that has the father of the song say
to his son if he did not fight in Vietnam, he was not his son anymore. With a no-good father like that, life may
have been like Vietnam to begin with, and what kind of
father betrays his son over something he himself is clueless about? Talk about a generation gap! Rozsa wisely did not want this crap in the
film, but it landed up in the end credits anyhow.
Focusing
on Rozsa’s instrumentals, he understood what he was doing and that the film was
so shallow, that much like in the American Military’s approach to the real
thing, the “Indians” were replaced by the Viet Cong. Though it sounds like as simple as the TV ads
where the restaurant coffee is replaced by Folgers Crystals, that little thing
called genocide makes the real difference.
Unlike the recent Mel Gibson film We
Were Soldiers (2002), which tells of the first Vietnam battle without going into the
catastrophe that was ahead, this film ignores anything outside of its narrow
boundaries and gets worse with age.
The use
of “ethnic” signifier music and instruments like the zither would almost be the
stereotypical use of such signifiers of foreign cultures in more naďve
Hollywood product, but Rozsa integrates them in a more naturalistic and active
way throughout that sets this score a step ahead of such fare. With the film, it still seems at least
quasi-racist, but it stands out better without it. Rozsa in one respect was fighting a losing
battle making music for this film, and without him, it would have been far
worse than it already is.
What
happens is that the master composer still gets trapped in the repetition of the
film and it limits what he would have done if the film actually dealt with Vietnam correctly. Though the “country” (read establishment)
could not deal with discussion of the situation at the time, all you have to do
is compare the film to the music in Michael Cimino’s 1978 masterwork The Deer Hunter to get the difference
between what Rozsa was up against and not.
Even what The Beatles were doing with new instruments at the time
exceeds this film, through not fault of Rozsa’s own. Either way, this CD is limited to only 3,000
pressings, so those interested should go to www.filmscoremonthly.com and find
out about how to order, plus more information about it and the many other great
FSM CDs available.
And now a
final word on a vital point in the booklet.
As noted, Rozsa did this score when so many great, key veteran composers
were getting loss ion the shuffle of new filmmaking, new composers and the
decline of the original Hollywood studio system. The
loss of the work of these masters, especially their lack of use, has had long
term negative effects on world cinema that in a few ways it never recovered
from. Part of cinematic literacy is
understanding film music, and while there were so many great new innovators
(unlike now, a separate essay for another time), the later work they did do was
still extraordinary often because of their excessive talent. It is as sad as new filmmakers not knowing
how or why to turn to so many great veteran actors. Arrogance, intended or not, never helps
filmmaking. As much as The Green Berets can be trivialized,
which is very much, the talent of the craftpersons who worked on it should
never be forgotten. That is why having
Rozsa’s score finally out for the film is a fitting tribute to him above all
else.
- Nicholas Sheffo
