Good Guys Wear Black (1978) on Netflix
Major John T. Booker led a commando team into Vietnam on a mission he was told was a rescue. Five years later he teaches at UCLA, and the survivors are being killed.
- Netflix1.7/5
- IMDb5.2/104,476 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes17%
Trailer
Plot summary
In 1973, an elite CIA unit called the Black Tigers is sent into the Vietnam jungle, its members told they are on a mission to free American prisoners of war. Five years later, their leader, Major John T. Booker, lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches political science at UCLA and races cars in his spare time. A reporter named Margaret sits in on one of his lectures with questions about that botched mission. Then the men who came home from the unit begin to die one at a time, and Booker, once their commander, tries to find out why.
Cast
- Tony Manninoas Gordie Jones
- Virginia Wingas Mhin's Wife
Show all 20 cast
- Kathy McCullenas Kelly
- Anthony Manninoas Gordie Jones - The Black Tigers
- Joe Bennettas Lou Goldberg - The Black Tigers
- Michael Payneas Mitch - The Black Tigers
- Don Pikeas Hank - The Black Tigers
- Benjamin J. Perryas Finney - The Black Tigers
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Good Guys Wear Black (1978)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Chuck Norris pitched Good Guys Wear Black to a producer who asked why the film would make money by telling him that America's four million karate practitioners knew him, and if half of them went it would gross $6 million on a $1 million budget.
- When Good Guys Wear Black could not get distribution, the producers released it themselves, renting theaters in individual cities around the country for a flat fee and keeping the box-office receipts, while Chuck Norris traveled along promoting it from cities to hamlets.
- Good Guys Wear Black made Chuck Norris the first successful homegrown American martial arts star after years of imported Hong Kong kung fu films, he having previously been best known as a villain in Bruce Lee's Way of the Dragon.
- Chuck Norris's long Vietnam War dialogue scene with James Franciscus was watched by Steve McQueen, who advised Norris to let supporting characters carry the exposition and to speak only when something important had to be said.
- Norris estimated that he gave more than 2,000 interviews during a year-long publicity tour for the film, and says the tour put him in hospital with laryngitis.
- Chuck Norris's character in The Expendables 2 was named Booker "The Lone Wolf" as a homage to John T. Booker, his character in Good Guys Wear Black.
