Go Tell the Spartans

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Go Tell the Spartans

Directed by	Ted Post
Produced by	Allan F. Bodoh Mitchell Cannold
Written by	Wendell Mayes
Starring	Burt Lancaster Craig Wasson Marc Singer Evan C. Kim Jonathan Goldsmith Dolph Sweet Joe Unger
Music by	Dick Halligan
Distributed by	Avco Embassy
Release date(s)	June 14, 1978 (USA)
Running time	112 min.
Language	English
Budget	$1.5 million
IMDb profile

Go Tell the Spartans is a low-budget and critically acclaimed 1978 American film about U.S. advisors in the early days of the Vietnam War. It was based on Incident at Muc Wa^[1], a 1967 novel by Daniel Ford. The screenplay by Wendell Mayes was shopped around for years with various older Hollywood leading men cast in the role of Asa Barker, a war-weary major who provides adult supervision to a cadre of "Raiders" (loosely based on United States Army Special Forces) who garrison a deserted village called Muc Wa. In reality Muc Wa is the misspelling of a real special forces base in South Vietnam's Plain of Reeds, pronounced the same, but spelled Muc Hoa. Many special forces and PACV crews served there during the Vietnam War.

In the end, director Ted Post persuaded Avco Embassy Pictures to produce the film on a shoestring budget. He sent the script to his friend Burt Lancaster, 65. who was recuperating from a knee injury. His Major Barker walks with a pronounced limp throughout the film. Lancaster called back two days later, calling the script "brilliant" and agreeing to star in it. Later, when the production ran out of money, Lancaster advanced $150,000 to finish it. (It was shot in 31 days at the Magic Mountain theme park near Valencia, California, and some of the scenes had to be re-dubbed because the rumble of the rollercoaster suggested helicopters coming to the rescue of the besieged garrison.) Younger actors were Marc Singer as a gung-ho captain hoping to earn the Combat Infantryman Badge, and Craig Wasson as an idealistic draftee.^[2]

The film's title was taken from Simonides's epitaph to the men who died at Thermopylae: "Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie."

1 Reception
2 Trivia
3 External links
4 Notes

[edit] Reception

Though the film received only a patchwork release in the U.S., it was praised by critics, especially those who were against the war. "In sure, swift strokes," wrote Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in Saturday Review, "it shows the irrelevance of the American presence in Vietnam, the corruption wrought by that irrelevance, and the fortuity, cruelty, and waste of an irrelevant war." Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic found it "the best film I've seen about the Vietnam War." More broadly, Roger Grooms in The Cincinnati Enquirer judged it to be "one of the noblest films, ever, about men in crisis." Wendell Mayes received the 1978 Writers Guild of America award for the Spartans screenplay.

Over time, Spartans has become regarded as an overlooked classic. At one of its revivals, it was described in these terms: "A cult fave--and deservedly so--Go Tell the Spartans was hard-headed and brutally realistic about our dead-end presence in Vietnam; released the same year as Coming Home and The Deer Hunter, the film garnered critical admiration, but audiences preferred individualized sagas, sentiment and romantic melodrama. Rather than tackle the effects of the war on physically and/or emotionally wounded vets, this brave film exposed the fundamental tactical lunacy of the conflict as perceived by an American officer (Burt Lancaster) who knows better but must follow through on stupid, self-destructive orders from above. This is one of Lancaster's best performances: embittered, a cog in the military juggernaut, this good man foresees the killing waste to come." "^[3]

[edit] Trivia

This is the second film where Lancaster was bedeviled by knee troubles. It John Frankenheimer's The Train, Lancaster injured himself while playing golf a day off during shooting. A scene where he was injured was created to explain his limp.