Go Tell the Spartans
| Go Tell the Spartans | |
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theatrical poster
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| Directed by | Ted Post |
| Produced by | Allan F. Bodoh Mitchell Cannold |
| Written by |
Wendell Mayes Novel Daniel Ford |
| Starring |
Burt Lancaster Craig Wasson Marc Singer |
| Music by | Dick Halligan |
| Cinematography | Harry Stradling, Jr. |
| Edited by | Millie Moore |
| Distributed by | Avco Embassy Pictures |
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Release date
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Running time
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114 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $1.5 million |
Go Tell the Spartans is a 1978 American war film directed by Ted Post, starring Burt Lancaster, and based on Daniel Ford's 1967 novel Incident at Muc Wa, 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.
The story was inspired by a futile special forces operation in 1964 at Tan Hoa in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, an objective that turned out to an abandoned settlement containing only a field, an abandoned airstrip and three or four French gravestones. The graves inspired the film's title, taken 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.
Major Asa Barker (Burt Lancaster) has been given this command: a poorly-manned outpost over seeing three villages named Boo Jum, Mung Tau & Hat Song and he is ordered to re-occupy a nearby, deserted hamlet named Muc Wa in rural South Vietnam somewhere near the rural Da Nang to Phnom Penh (Cambodia) highway that a decade earlier had been the scene of a massacre of French soldiers during the First Indochina War. Barker is a weary infantry veteran in his third war (he served in the Pacific during World War II as well as in the Korean War), who provides veteran supervision to a cadre of advisors attached to a group of South Vietnamese who are ordered to garrison the deserted hamlet of Muc Wa.
Major Barker and his executive officer, the career-orientated Captain Olivetti receive four replacements. Second Lieutenant Hamilton has been passed over for promotion and sees volunteering for Vietnam is a way to obtain a promotion to remain in the Army. First Sergeant Oleozewski served in the Korean War under Major Barker and is burnt out from three tours in Vietnam; his last assignment saw his previous unit massacred. Cpl Abraham Lincoln is a combat medic and a drug addict. The mystery to Major Barker is the fourth man, the draftee Cpl. Courcey, a demolitions expert who extended his enlistment by six months to serve in Vietnam. Major Barker sends his four new men plus Cpl. Ackley, a communications expert to garrison Muc Wa with a half French half Vietnamese interpreter/interrogation specialist called Cowboy, a hardcore squad of Nung mercenaries and a motley mob of about 20 South Vietnamese Popular Force civilian "troops" armed with shotguns and old rifles with a sprinkling of machine guns attempt to create a defensible outpost at Muc Wa.
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Wikipedia