Propaganda Chiller

In the Year of the Pig is a new kind of chiller movie. Audiences sit in helpless frustration watching scenes of unreeling historical horror. Producer-Director Emile de Antonio (Point of Order) has taken his ghoulish episodes from newsreels made in and about Viet Nam over the past three decades. The result is a slanted but devastating account of the spiraling American involvement in Southeast Asia.

The cast of characters--politicians, journalists, civilians, combatants--at once supply historical continuity and act as a kind of tragic chorus. Journalists like Jean Lacouture and David Halberstam recount the development and deepening of the war. Meanwhile the screen shows scenes of John Foster Dulles promulgating his doctrine of "collective security" and French troops vanquished at Dienbienphu. There are glimpses of wartime savagery on both sides, and there is even some comic relief, as when Madame Nhu announces "About that question of the rubber stamp parliament: I have repeatedly said, 'But what's wrong to rubber-stamp the laws we approve?' "

The brass have their day, too, with Curtis Le May announcing, "The world is watching us in Viet Nam to see if we put our money where our mouth is," and Colonel George S. Patton III, with an aw-shucks grin, beaming into the camera and describing ARVN enthusiastically as a "bloody good bunch of killers."

A powerful if oversimplified introduction to the political and moral morass of Vietnam, In the Year of the Pig is ultimately confounded by its own sense of outrage. Such a partisan representation of history is better known by the much-abused term propaganda, and its message gets across to those who come into the theater already in sympathy with what it has to say.

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