USA,
1987, 86 min
Shown in 1988
CREDITS
- dir
-
Bill Couturié
- prod
-
Bill Coutourié
- scr
-
Richard Dewhurst, Bill Coutourié
- cam
-
Michael Nin
- cast
-
Tom Berenger, Ellen Burstyn, Robert DeNiro, Michael J. Fox, Martin Sheen, Kathleen Turner (narrators)
- source
-
Home Box Office
- gga award
-
Best of Category, Bay Area Film & Video: Documentary
-
COMMENTS
Bill Couturié in person.
OTHER
Dear America is a moving testimony to the simple prose, the complex poetry and the savage polemics that were mailed by l9-year-old hands in Vietnam. The letters are contradictory, some believing in the war, Some not, some ambivalent, all scared shitless. These letters are read by a galaxy of Hollywood stars (who gave their voices free, as did the musicians) over a spectacular assembly of rare archival film that takes us through the war, from Johnson to Nixon, from Kent State to Martin Luther King. Seeing this movie after Platoon, Hamburger Hill and Full Metal Jacket, the documentary looks amazingly real, and vice versa: there's less blood but more pain. Like the Hollywood dramas this is a tribute to the men and women who went over there, but it has the same weaknesses, a refusal to confront the reasons why and a refusal to adopt any coherent attitude towards the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong: North Vietnamese film is captioned as "propaganda" but film of General Westmoreland boosting morale isn't. The wounds of Vietnam are still open and running.
—Adrian Turner, London Film Festival
FACTOID #232
Our first seminar at the Festival was entitled Censorship and the Actor’s Art: A Symposium, featuring panelists Michael Mayer and Lou Greenspan at Grace Cathedral, October 24, 1966.
