Lyndon Johnson once famously said of the Vietnam War: "The ultimate victory will depend on the hearts and minds of the people who actually live out there." This unabashedly hardline 1974 Best Documentary Feature Academy Award winner, whose title that quote inspired, argues that victory was anybody but America's.
Produced and released while the war remained raging, Hearts and Minds is a very brave and liberal indictment of US foreign policy in Vietnam and as you'd probably suspect, ever since its release it's attracted reverence and scorn pretty equally depending on who's assessing it. I first head about it through one of my favourite film critics Marc Fennell's book Planet According to the Movies, in which Fennell says not to expect balance from it, as it is an activist film, and he's right. But I was surprised to find as I watched it this week that while it does focus deliberately on the experiences of the Vietnamese and disillusioned American vets, director Peter Davis actually takes a genuinely calm and impartial method of depicting the atrocities and handling the interviews. He lets the film's content and message speak for themselves without diluting his defiantly biased approach.
If you share my politics (which, therefore, admittedly make me a pretty easy-to-please critic here), Hearts and Minds will move and enrage you. The only negative I can link to it is how relevant it remains. In the most powerful and controversial scene, a South Vietnamese soldier is laid to rest in a funeral with his desperately grieving family, and then Davis cuts to an interview with US Army Chief of Staff General William Westmoreland, who claims: "The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient." Then we hear from former Captain Randy Floyd, who answers a question about whether America had learned anything from Vietnam with: "I think we're trying not to learn." 46 years on, the West is still trying not to.
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