Last night I saw a movie that all Americans should see: “Hanoi Hilton.” It wasn’t easy to find it showing anywhere, even in a large metropolitan area, but I finally found it in one small theater.
“Hanoi Hilton” isn’t jolly entertainment, but it is vital history. It’s the graphic story of how our prisoners of war were treated during their years of imprisonment by the Vietnamese Communists.
The movie is magnificently produced. The camera work is outstanding and the acting is gripping. The history is authentic and accurate, as confirmed by our POWs who lived through the awful experience.
But the liberals and especially the liberal entertainment critics don’t like “Hanoi Hilton,” and they have savaged it in reviews. It’s hard to remember any movie which the critics have tried so hysterically to “kill.”
After you see it, you’ll understand why. The liberals have four good reasons for hating “Hanoi Hilton.”
First, the movie shows Jane Fonda’s trip to Hanoi, and how she worked hand in glove with the Communist captors to betray the American POWs. The leftwing entertainment world has closed ranks and said, how dare you tell the truth about what Jane did?
Second, the movie shows the Communists as the evil, sadistic, cruel monsters that they really are. That also is documented fact, but the leftwing entertainment world can’t stand hearing this said.
Third, the movie shows a Vietnamese Communist boss boasting to the American POWs, “The real war is not in Vietnam; it is in the cities of America, in Berkeley and on the Washington Mall. What we don’t win on the battlefield, your journalists will win for us, on your own doorstep.”
Horrors! Here is a movie that tells what really happened in the Vietnam War! The liberals are in shock that someone would dare to say it — and portray it so effectively.
Fourth, while the liberals have acclaimed movies about Vietnam that show Americans denouncing our efforts to preserve freedom there, they can’t stand to see a movie about American servicemen in Vietnam who do NOT criticize America, but instead draw strength to survive from their religious faith and patriotism.
Don’t get the idea that movie critics are against war movies. Generally, they revel in movies that dramatize war’s ugliness, tragedy and follies. But the liberal movie critics don’t want a new generation to know the truth about how our courageous American servicemen were betrayed by the leftwing agitators, journalists, and movie stars.
America now has a whole generation of young people to whom the Vietnam War is as remote as the Spanish American War. They need to learn what happened, and that’s why it is important that they see “Hanoi Hilton.”
The young generation ought to know how Jane Fonda and others cooperated with the Communists in trying to exploit the POWs for propaganda purposes. The young generation ought to learn how our bravest fighting men were betrayed by the news media in the United States.
The young generation should learn these lessons of Vietnam so that never again will our servicemen, who are sent overseas to fight, be able to say, as one of them said in the movie, “People at home no longer care that we’re here.”
Mercifully, the movie spares us closeups of the torture. Most of us wouldn’t even be able to watch what our valiant POWs endured. It was bad enough to see the prisoners carried out of Room 18, the torture chamber.
Actually, “Hanoi Hilton” has very little violence compared with many other modern movies, such as “Platoon,” which has been widely advertised and acclaimed. “Hanoi Hilton” includes only a few bad words.
A few critics dared to praise this important film. One called it “powerfully acted, powerfully directed,” another called it “dynamic drama,” another called it “impossible to forget.” That’s just the point. We must not forget the suffering and sacrifices of these real-life American heroes. There were 725 American POWs in Vietnam, and 2,421 American servicemen are still unaccounted for.
Moviegoers seldom take their orders from the critics. But theater owners seem to. That’s why this important movie isn’t booked into many theaters and isn’t widely advertised by those few theaters that do book it. Give yourself a challenge; try to find it playing somewhere; ask when it will come, and urge your friends to attend.
