Reminds me of Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland's radical period w/ FTA tour. Fuck The Army.
(Read a bit of Andrew Hunt' history of Vietnam Veterans Against The War, a few days ago. Fonda gave loads of $ to VVAW for the Winter Soldier Investigation hearing/organizing. http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Winter_Soldier/WS_entry.html )
http://www.filmthreat.com/Reviews.asp?Id=2376 "FTA," a documentary produced by and starring Jane Fonda, was the rare film which bluntly addressed the Vietnam War and the policies behind the U.S. involvement. But unfortunately, it was a little too rare: the film was abruptly withdrawn after only one week in release and has never been made available for re-issue, either in theaters or TV or home video. (This review is based on a bootleg video copy which the writer recently received as a birthday gift!)
During 1971 and 1972, Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland led a quasi-USO tour that played in towns outside of U.S. military bases along the West Coast and throughout the Pacific. Fonda referred to the tour as "political vaudeville" and the show itself was called "FTA" (the acronym standing for "Free the Army" and "Fuck the Army"). The audiences were primarily the men and women of the U.S. armed services, and during the tour Fonda and her company interviewed the various soldiers, sailors and marines regarding their thoughts on the Indochina slaughterhouse.
Viewing "FTA" today is like opening a long-forgotten time capsule. The film's true power comes in the frank, often rude comments from the servicemen and women who openly question the purpose and planning of the American involvement in Vietnam. Most memorable here are the members of the U.S.S. Coral Sea, who presented a petition to their superiors demanding a halt to the bombing in Vietnam; African-American soldiers and marines who angrily decried racist attitudes among the white commanding officers at the U.S. military installations, usually with an upraised fist of the Black Power movement; women serving in the U.S. Air Force who talk unhappily about sexual harassment from their male counterparts; and soldiers who pointedly refer to the dictatorial government in South Vietnam which was being presented as the democracy which they were supposedly defending. The extraordinary air of dissent that rises out of "FTA" provides a rare glimpse into a unhappy and demoralized fighting force stuck in a war which they did not believe in.
To its disadvantage, however, "FTA" loses its focus frequently and tries to squeeze in endless voices of malcontent politics. A lengthy segment is given to the complaints of the people of Okinawa regarding the U.S. military presence on their island, and an even longer segment is provided to a Philippine street theater protest against U.S. imperialism (though oddly, no straightforward mention is made of the U.S. backing of the corrupt Marcos regime). There is also an irrelevant visit to a museum in Hiroshima which documented the effects of the atomic bomb's visit to the city in 1945. Strangely, the film shortchanges a truly harrowing and heartbreaking vision: a very brief chat with a discharged American soldier who lost an arm in Vietnam and left the service to wander aimlessly through Japan, without a home or a sense of purpose in life. This unfortunate young man appears literally out of nowhere and disappears almost as quickly; his story should have been given a film unto itself. <SNIP> -- Michael Pugliese