Go Tell the Spartans (1978) on Netflix
In 1964, Major Asa Barker commands a small advisory post in South Vietnam. His orders are to reoccupy Muc Wa, a hamlet where French colonial troops were wiped out a decade earlier.
- Netflix3.0/5
- IMDb6.6/103,606 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes67%
Trailer
Plot summary
In 1964, Major Asa Barker, a veteran of World War II and Korea, takes command of a poorly manned American advisory outpost that overlooks three villages in South Vietnam. His orders are to reoccupy Muc Wa, a deserted hamlet on the highway from Da Nang to Phnom Penh where French colonial troops were massacred ten years earlier. Barker and his executive officer, Captain Olivetti, send four replacements to hold it: Lieutenant Hamilton, Sergeant Major Oleozewski, Corporal Abraham Lincoln and Corporal Courcey.
Cast
- Dennis Howardas Cpl. Abraham Lincoln
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Go Tell the Spartans (1978)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Burt Lancaster, then 65 and recuperating from a knee injury that left his character limping, agreed to star in the film and, when the 31-day production budget ran short, paid $150,000 of his own money to complete it.
- The story came from a futile 1964 special-forces operation at Tan Hoa in Vietnam's Central Highlands, where the objective turned out to be an abandoned settlement whose three or four French gravestones inspired the film's title, taken from Simonides's epitaph to the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae.
- In 1977 the U.S. Army refused to assist the production unless the script and characters were changed, objecting that the film's "offhand collection of losers" misrepresented its 1964 advisors, whom it called handpicked and experienced.
- Robert Mitchum, William Holden and Paul Newman were among the older leading men offered the role of Major Asa Barker before Lancaster took it.
- Screenwriter Wendell Mayes optioned Daniel Ford's novel with his own money, but every major studio, including Paramount and 20th Century Fox, turned down his attempt to finance it as a film.
- Mayes's screenplay replaced the novel's elite Special Forces, the "US Army Raiders," with a collection of misfits, Military Assistance Advisory Group advisors, and cut a female reporter character.
