Criterion Collection: Hearts & Minds [DVD] [1974] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

The images from Hearts and Minds are disturbingly heartbreaking and grotesque. For example, a naked little girl is shown running down a road with skin pealing off her body as napalm continues to eat into her flesh. American soldiers watch the girl running by them, until it seems as if the camera that is capturing the moment urges the soldiers to help the girl. A Viet Cong suspect is shot point blank in the head on the street and his body falls to the ground with blood pulsating out of his temple. A child cries in agony by the grave of someone close to him while the grave diggers take a break with a cool Coca Cola. These unsettling scenes slowly descend into some unused space of the brain as they will return to consciousness in order to haunt the viewer of the horrors of the Vietnam War at a later time.

Peter Davis had accumulated over 200 hours of footage before beginning the long process of editing down the film into a feasible 112 minutes. During these 112 minutes the audience gets to follow how the American mindset which is created from young age, and how it influenced the decisions of the war. Davis brings the audience to a high school football game where young minds are formed into believing that what they do is right and that they have to win at all costs. Similar mentality saturates the thinking behind the American decision makers as President Lyndon B. Johnson increased the American participation in the war, to which he stated, "The ultimate victory will depend on the hearts and minds of the people who actually live out there." The President's statement also became the title for the film.

The Vietnamese people, whose living standards were and are much different from the typical American lifestyle, fought for independence and freedom while the United States fought against the fear of Communism. This political and fundamental difference in perceiving the war was monumental as Communism, in essence, become the liberator for the Vietnamese people, and the Americans were perceived as the evil invaders. Most Vietnamese were opposed to the American's, as most people in Vietnam are poor, and those who promoted the so-called Americanism of Vietnam were war profiteers and people in high positions. The war continued into a dirty slaughter of civilians and children through dropping millions of bombs, spraying the herbicide Agent Orange, burning villages to the ground, and killing suspect Viet Cong as the American soldiers were in constant fear of being shot in the back.

Interesting comments were made by several characters such as General Westmoreland who said that "the Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does the Westerner." This followed by a shot of a child weeping in misery by a grave, which brings across the message of the ignorance that some of the leading military staff possessed. However, General Westmoreland continued to make derogatory comments about the Vietnamese people and continued to come across as a bigot and a racist.

Hearts and Minds was initially delayed in the United States for a year as a result of the distributors, Columbia, being afraid of legal repercussions. However, the film went on to win the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 1975, and the Oscar's positive appraisal of Hearts and Minds led to a massive controversy. Nonetheless, Hearts and Minds message was out as it was the biggest documentary of the time with a million dollar budget.

Ultimately, the audience will have traveled a rough cinematic journey, which could be summed up by Daniel Ellsworth's quote "We weren't on the wrong side -- we were the wrong side." This notion is offered through several perspectives while viewing the horrors of war, as families were destroyed, children burnt to unidentifiable lumps of meat, and men wished they were home with their loved ones. Hearts and Minds provides the audience several interesting notions to ponder, but the most vivid idea would be that war should be avoided at all costs as people are mutilated and die on all sides.

It's interesting that so many of those who have reviewed this film have included information about when and where they first saw it. But I understand. In 1974 we had cowardly withdrawn our promised assistance to our Vietnamese "friends." The riots had stopped. We stopped caring about a war that continued unabated; the evening news no longer led with stories of American vs. "bad guy" bodycounts. I saw the film in a theater located on one of the very streets where the most bottles had been thrown by students and other youth, and where the most heads had been bashed by Seattle's finest (gee, some things never change!) When the film ended there was absolute silence: no one spoke; no one moved from their seat; it seemed no one even breathed. After almost a minute you could finally hear some muffled sobs only. There were, and are, no words to express the darkness of men's souls; there is only art. And, besides being a good documentary on the Vietnam war,
(by "good" I mean it will anger both sides, and provoke much conversation and debate,) this film is art, of the most important kind.
A late-blooming "child of the 60's" I am oft-dismayed that more recent generations neither know nor value the cultural icons of our youth, many of which I still hold dear. But the single most true thing about our generation was growing up in the shadow of a news machine that fed us war and hate on a daily basis. A shadow that was sometimes our own hatred, and sometimes our fear of oncoming nuclear missles (which fortunately never came,) or the fear of a loved one in a body bag.

Please watch this film. You'll gain a better understanding, not just of part of the war, but of a part of the soul of America . . .my part.

This is, without doubt, one of the best, most memorable movies I have ever seen. It has stuck with me since I first saw it as part of a high school film-making course in in Ottawa, Canada in 1975. It was the first, last and only time I ever saw it and I remember it all vividly 25 years later. At the time it exposed me to the absolute evils and sickening realities of a modern war for really the first time. It's lack of narrative adds a peculiar realism that I have never seen repeated in a documentary or fiction work. So controversial was the picture that at the 1974 Oscars, the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences convinced the late Frank Sinatra to go on stage after it won best documentary to tell the audience the movie's award victory did not mean the Academy supported the movie's avowed anti-Vietnam War tone and tenor. The move by the Academy was unprecedented -- and has never been repeated. This movie must be re-issued. It is an outstanding testiment to the power of film.