Bill Couturié's documentary compilation of archive footage and oral readings of letters from the Vietnam front lines. The only serious false notes in it -- the too discriminatingly hip selections of goldie-oldies are not seriously false -- are the suavely "professional" speaking voices of the narrators (Robert De Niro, Michael J. Fox, Willem Dafoe, Tom Berenger, Martin Sheen, Kathleen Turner, Ellen Burstyn, many others). They are all doing the best they can, and doing it out of the best of motives, and without any monetary compensation. And some of them, especially the less readily identifiable ones, do better than others. But in the emotionalizing and editorializing that some of them can't seem to keep out of their voices, they are guilty of the very sorts of Platoonisms and Full Metal Jacketries that otherwise are here so humiliatingly shown up. The letter readings, ostensibly the motivating force and distinguishing feature of the project, though in reality its one liability, are usually fairly brief anyway, in order to stay within the time-frame of the accompanying visual material. But what visual material it is! (What memories for anyone who was paying attention at the time. What an education for anyone who wasn't.) It stretches the full length and breadth of the war -- and, as near as it can, the incomprehensible height of it: possibly the main impression to come through here is of everyone involved, no matter how highly placed, being very much out of his depth. And a stony heart indeed would be needed, from this particular vantage, to hold back the waves of compassion from even the likes of General Westmoreland and President Johnson. If we can say that, we must be speaking of a work of art. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd