Robert Aldrich is certainly a Hollywood director worthy of a second look. Among the diverse types of films he directed were: Vera Cruz, Kiss Me Deadly, Attack!, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, The Dirty Dozen and Ulzana's Raid.
Toward the end of his career, in 1977, he directed Twilight's Last Gleaming.
This is a film in which a renegade Air Force general takes over a missile silo complex and threatens to launch 9 nuclear missiles at Russia unless the President of the US makes a secret document concerning the origins of the Vietnam War known to the American people.
What's amazing to me is that people believed, in 1977, that a disclosure of information to the American people might change anything. Indeed, information has been disclosed about the origins of the Vietnam War and barely a ripple was ever made due to it. Wikileaks has disclosed damning information about a major political candidate, and she will probably become the next president.
Lesson to be learned: information disclosure, in itself, changes nothing.
It is now part of the historical record that Lyndon Baines Johnson used a minor skirmish in the Gulf of Tonkin as a pretext to begin a major war against a technologically under-developed country of Buddhist farmers, in which over 50,000 Americans were killed as well as over 2 million Vietnamese (and other SE Asians).
So not only did/do Americans know of this, but Americans knew about Agent Orange and napalm as well as the Mai Lai Massacre. After photos of that massacre were released, over 50% of Americans still supported the war and objected to the prosecution of an officer involved in the killing of innocent Vietnamese civilians.
If the president, in this film, had disclosed the secret documents at the end of this film, America would have greeted these materials with a vast, collective yawn.
The very ending seemed the most interesting to me in which characters begin to speculate that there is a source of power even greater than the US President and that the president is considered expendable to this source of power. I am not convinced there is one organized source, but there certainly are enough folks with shared interests to sway things if they want to.
An adventure/thriller worth watching from the ever thoughtful perspective of Robert Aldrich.
You can watch the film by clicking on this link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAmr-WBCRes
