HOME > VIETNAM > SPARTANS

Go Tell the Spartans

"One of the noblest films, ever, about men in crisis" -- Cincinnati Enquirer

Click here to order the DVD from Amazon
Also available in VHS format

Go Tell the Spartans

"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 years 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 confict 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. With Craig Wasson as an idealistic young draftee. (Adapted from Daniel Ford's fine novel Incident at Muc Wa)." -- from the program notes at the Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center, May 2000.

What the critics said at the time:

• "This is the best film I've seen about the Vietnam war." -- Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic.

• "A spare, riveting war movie. It strips the genre of all pretense, satirizes the rhetorical military cliches, and is tougher than any war movie I've ever seen." -- Boston Globe.

• "Laconic, incisive, unpretentious, understated.... In sure, swift strokes, 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." -- Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in Saturday Review (was Arthur punning, or didn't he realize that the Spartans were laconic?).

• "Beyond question, the greatest work to date upon the Vietnam involvement. It is one of the noblest films, ever, about men in crisis." -- Cincinnati Enquirer.

The scriptwriter, Wendell Mayes, won the 1978 Writers Guild Award for the screenplay. Burt Lancaster's biographer, Kate Buford, called Spartans "one of his finest movies."

For more about Lancaster and the filming of Go Tell the Spartans, click here.