Skirmishes, Ambushes And Boobytraps Explode Into The Most Savage War That Ever Scorched A Land

We're getting strafed, shelled, bombed and blasted. And it isn't even our damned war!


Go Tell the Spartans is set in Vietnam during that period in which American troops were euphemistically termed "advisors". Reluctantly dispensing much of that advice is veteran American major Asa Barker (Burt Lancaster). Though he knows what works and what doesn't on the battlefield, Barker is obliged to carry out the go-nowhere policies of the American military brass. His current objective is a woebegone, barely crucial outpost, which he must defend with a handful of green soldiers and end-of-tether Vietnamese militiamen. True to his predictions, the outpost is overwhelmed by the Vietcong, who have something to fight about and are ruthless in their tactics. Before the relief troops can arrive, virtually everyone is senselessly killed, including Barker. The only survivor is Corporal Stephen Courcey (Craig Wasson), a willing draftee whose initial idealism dies along with his comrades. Wendell Mayes adapted Go Tell the Spartans from the novel Incident at Muc Wa by Daniel Ford. ~


Go Tell the Spartans is a 1978 American war film based on Daniel Ford's 1967 novel Incident at Muc Wa,[1] about U.S. Army military advisors during the early part of the Vietnam War in 1964, a time when Ford was a correspondent in Vietnam for The Nation. It stars Burt Lancaster and was directed by Ted Post.
The film's title is from Simonides's epitaph to the three hundred soldiers who died fighting Persian invaders at Thermopylae, Greece: "Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie."
The choice of film's name thus constitutes a deliberate "spoiler" by the film makers, telling anyone familiar with the source of the quote that the film's soldier characters - like the Spartans at Thermopylae - had been sent to their deaths.


Go Tell the Spartans was released in the United States on June 14, 1978. It was re-released on September 7, 1987, and came out on video in the United States on May 13, 1992.[5]
Though the film had a limited release in the United States, critics, especially those opposed to the Vietnam War, praised it: "In sure, swift strokes," wrote Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in the Saturday Review, "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." Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic found it "the best film I've seen about the Vietnam War." More broadly, Roger Grooms in the Cincinnati Enquirer judged it to be "one of the noblest films, ever, about men in crisis."
Over time, the film became an overlooked anti-war classic. At one of its revivals, it was described as:
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 year as Coming Home and The Deer Hunter, the film won critical admiration, but audiences preferred individualised sagas, sentiment, and romantic melodrama. Rather than tackle the effects of the war on physically and emotionally wounded vets, this brave film exposed the fundamental, tactical lunacy of the war 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.[6]
In 1979, Wendell Mayes' screenplay was nominated for the Writers Guild of America Award for "Best Drama Adapted from Another Medium (Screen)".


Release Date: September 29, 1978


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