Minor Burt Lancaster completism prompted by David Trotter's article on David Thomson's The Fatal Alliance: A Century of War on Film in the London Review of Books. Based on Daniel Ford's story Incident at Muc Wa (1967) which is a rough contemporary of Halberstam's memoir and novel.
It's 1964 and a small group of American military advisers, led by Lancaster's Korean-War vet Major Asa Barker, find themselves in a locale called Penang somewhere in the south of Việt Nam. A mystifying expansion of the group is explained when General Harnitz (Dolph Sweet) helicopters in: they're to establish a garrison at the old French settlement of Muc Wa. The result, of course, is their own private Điện Biên Phủ.
Lancaster delivers all the funny lines quite flatly (some are quite amusing) but the attendant flatness of the other performances leaves it unclear if this is failing to be a comedy in the style of Altman's M.A.S.H. (about the Korean War, with the same racial slurs) or failing to be something more substantial. Amongst the stereotypes is an intelligence officer who is nothing like Daniel Ellsberg.
IMDB tells me it was shot in California with Vietnamese refugees. This makes me wonder if it wasn't one of the ingredients for that episode of The Sympathizer.
Roger Ebert: two-and-a-half stars. The cliches did their duty. All the details at Wikipedia and more at IMDB trivia.
