Anyone seen this? I came across a reference to it in a review of “coming home from war†movies, I think in The New Yorker. I had never heard of it, and now, having watched it, I’m not too surprised. It’s a pity, though, because this movie could have been so much better. The Gardens of Stone are military cemeteries, specifically Arlington National Cemetery in 1968-69 at the height of the Vietnam War. An elite army detail known as the Old Guard has the responsibility of managing the burials and ceremonials surrounding them, and is of course marked by the mounting US military losses. James Caan is the older officer who is having doubts about the war. Most of the men (and they are all men) are happy to be out of harm’s way, but one young soldier (D.B. Sweeney) desperately wants to get to Vietnam. He does. Since the movie opens with his funeral and his voice over before flashing back, the consequences are no surprise.
Yet despite the potential – and it was also directed by Francis Ford Coppola – this didn’t work for me. The script is horrible with touches of humor in inappropriate places and stiff speeches passing for emotion. All the actors are wasted, especially Angelica Huston, as a Washington Post reporter who believes the war is genocide but loves Caan. This wonderful actor is reduced to a simpering lightweight. Exchanges between Caan and his immediate superior, James Earl Jones, are bantering and mostly enjoyable, but nothing is able to capture the power and poignancy of the situation that they are in so that the promise of the movie is never realized. Except for some newsreel images of Vietnam near the end of the film that remind you of the human costs of that war. It is remarkable to me that the same man could direct this and also Apocalypse Now.
Nominations for the best “home front†movies?
I recall my reaction to Gardens being exactly the same, ‘though I saw it when it came out and little of it sticks in my memory.
Best homefront film…. _In Country_ (Vietnam) is a pretty good book but a not very good film (with Bruce Willis, being serious Bruce Willis). The Best Years of Our Lives (WWII) is pretty damn good, and even for those of us at an aesthetic/critical distance from the conventions of the period can be quite moving. But mostly what comes to mind are misfires, good efforts marred by this or that: Coming Home and The Deer Hunter are like mirror images of male melodrama, the former hyperbolic in its weeping and the latter hyperbolic in its not-weeping-but-stoic-return-of-repressed-violence. (In the former, women–or maybe just sex–allow you to get in touch with your feelings; in the latter, guns allow closure.) Swing Shift could have been so great, a real home-front (and not just a coming-home) movie, but (as I recall, having also seen it at the time of release) it is jumbled in tone and plot, unsure what it’s up to.
If we were willing to stretch our definitions, to allow films which indirectly tie to issues of post-war/homefront concern, I might lean toward The Searchers–Wayne’s Ethan Edwards is a decorated Civil War hero, trying to return to the domestic space, finding it torn asunder he ostensibly seeks to ‘rescue’ it but is another force for its destruction…. it gets at something about the impossibility of recuperation back into homelife. And I know there’s all kinds of critical stuff making the same case about film noir’s ethos emerging from a post-war worldview.
I actually walked out of Gardens of Stone when I saw it in the theater–which is either a testimony to my lack of attention or a comment on the film. It’s too long ago for me to remember why I walked out, but I remember the dialogue being rather painful. The best return/home front movies might come from the genre of noir that arose after WW2 (say, anywhere from immediately afterwards to ten years later)–movies that rarely make any direct reference to the recent war, but whose mood is unthinkable without it. You can all put together your own list, but a few of the great ones that come to mind are Clash by Night , Sunset Boulevard , Out of the Past and Detour . I also regard Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt as a great “home front” movie.