War Is Heck

By F.R.

THE BOYS IN COMPANY C Directed by Sidney J. Furie Screenplay by Rick Natkin and Sidney J. Furie

They said it couldn't be done. They said that no one could ever make a Viet Nam war movie as silly as John Wayne's legendary get-the-gooks epic, The Green Berets. But now we have The Boys in Com pany C, Sidney J. Furie's account of Marine warfare in the paddyfields, circa 1967-68. This inadvertently hilarious film is the Dien Bien Phu of war movies.

Furie, unlike Wayne, is on the side of the doves, but a brief exposure to the garbled ideology of Company C might per suade even Benjamin Spock to take up arms. The complex historical drama of Viet Nam becomes as mindless as a Saturday-morning cartoon. The bad guys are loutish American officers obsessed with body counts and South Vietnamese preoccupied with heroin smuggling. The good guys are the Marines in Company C, all of whom, apparently, fought the war against their will. The Vietnamese peasants are represented by picturesque extras who seem to be refugees from a way ward road company of Flower Drum Song.

The movie is as ignorant of film-making niceties as it is of its subject. Com pany C was shot in the flat light one associates with porno films; its often incomprehensible plot contains more credibility gaps than a William West moreland press briefing. Though Furie staged much of the film on location in Asia, the Viet Nam he re-creates is as placid as the Hollywood he built for Gable and Lombard. Even the sting of death is absent: this may be the first war movie ever to climax with a ponderous soccer match instead of a battle.

As for the boys in Company C, they are a demographically balanced platoon in the manner of World War II movies: a hippie, a black, a farm boy, a redneck and so on. The roles are played by unsown actors, who, like all good soldiers in a losing cause, are destined to fade away.

--F.R.

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