The Vietnam War produced classic Hollywood films — and hardly any classic female roles
Entertainment
The Vietnam War produced some of the most unforgettable films of the late 1970s and 1980s
“Me love you long time,” a Vietnamese sex worker tells the U.S. troops, swiveling her hips as she hawks her services. “You party?” The first female character in Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam War classic “Full Metal Jacket,” she appears for just a moment — and halfway through the film.
Likewise, it’s an hour into Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” when a helicopter suddenly deposits three women onto a stage. They’re scantily clad Playboy Bunnies, choppered in to rile up the troops. They, too, appear for just a few minutes.
The Vietnam War produced some of the most unforgettable films of the late 1970s and 1980s, as top Hollywood filmmakers like Kubrick, Coppola, Oliver Stone and others grappled with its painful legacy. Few, however, had classic, or even three-dimensional, female characters — with the notable exception of “Coming Home,” which won Jane Fonda an Oscar.
But while these films were almost exclusively about how war dehumanized men — with female characters mere devices to tell that story — the opposite was often true of Vietnamese films about the conflict. Many of these were told from a female viewpoint — the stories of brave and loyal women, for example, left holding families together.
Here are some ways that classic Vietnam War films used female characters to tell their stories:
The girl waiting back home
Stone’s change of focus
Widows and orphans
Sex workers and snipers
The enemy dehumanized
Village extras and Playboy Bunnies
