Documentary Classics: Thoughts And Feelings About 'Hearts And Minds'
Why the 1974 Oscar winner about the Vietnam War is still worth watching today.
This week, at the 18th Cinema Eye Honors, Peter Davis’s Hearts and Minds will receive the 2025 Legacy Award. The documentary recently turned 50 years old, and Davis celebrated his 88th birthday last week, so I felt it was time to watch the 1974 feature and write about its status as a classic nonfiction film. Well, I’ve started this post over and over and gone in different directions with my review. Writing about the legacy of Hearts and Minds is nearly as difficult as writing about the legacy of its subject, the Vietnam War. That alone is a good enough reason to consider its lasting significance.
When Davis and his team arrived in South Vietnam in the Fall of 1972, the U.S. had already begun pulling troops from the area, and the war seemed to be ending. By the time Hearts and Minds was released two years later, the American military had withdrawn but there would still be a few months until the Fall of Saigon marked the official end (see Rory Kennedy’s Last Days in Vietnam for that story). Even the film’s Oscar win for Best Documentary Feature occurred a few weeks before the war’s conclusion. Still, it plays like a postmortem, especially with the blur that comes decades later as events, plural, become event, singular.
Despite the lack of more distant hindsight, Davis intended for Hearts and Minds to address, if not answer, three historical questions (via the Library of Congress): “Why did we go to Vietnam in the first place; what was it we did there to Vietnam and the Vietnamese people; and what did the doing in turn do to us.” Merely being about the Vietnam War in a reportage sense wouldn’t have cut it, though, as this was, after all, a famously televised conflict. The time had come for documentaries to show the effects of the war, particularly for the Vietnamese. Haskell Wexler’s Introduction to the Enemy, starring Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, was shot after but released a month earlier than Hearts and Minds and similarly focuses on the Vietnamese people impacted by the war.
That’s where Davis’s film is most successful — and also the most problematic. He implicitly acknowledges within Hearts and Minds and has directly stated since then that filming these people was an additional way in which Americans, including himself, victimized Vietnam. It’s one reason that Hearts and Minds has such a perfect title. The term came from the strategy of gaining support from the Vietnamese people through pacification, or “winning hearts and minds.” The film also exploits the Vietnamese people, but it does so to reach the hearts and minds of its audience.
Mostly the hearts. The sequences shot in South Vietnam are one empathy-seeking portrait after another. They tend to be brief, but say a lot, as in their storytelling. Each person showing the destruction of their home or mourning the death of a loved one is the lead participant of a mini-documentary of their own. Better yet, these sequences get us to feel a lot. The emotional displays are obvious in this tactic, though other affecting scenes include the coffin maker working on caskets for children. The visual language of Hearts and Minds is anything but subtle.
Take the opening sequence, which made me immediately accept the documentary as an anti-war film. Davis presents scenes of villagers going about their day, some of them working in the fields. We hear Vietnamese music, not the usual rock and roll of Hollywood’s portrayal of the war. Then, American soldiers walk into the frame as if to invade that peaceful image of tradition and tranquility. Hearts and Minds may not have a narrator telling us what to see and understand (as was still the norm at the time for media like this), but it also doesn’t need one to get its messages across clearly.
In his commentary track recorded for the Criterion Collection release of the film, Davis says that while it’s not an apolitical work, he didn’t want Hearts and Minds “pounding” the audience with any message. He wants viewers to come up with their own conclusions. Like any documentary, though, this one communicates much through its editing, and it does so as heavily and with more power than it could do so vocally. So many interviews and sequences in the film contain intentional ironies and contradictions because of what they’re placed adjacent to in the assembly.
The strongest example involves General William Westmoreland claiming “the Oriental” doesn’t value life the same way Americans do in a clip following footage of a Vietnamese woman wailing in grief over the death of her husband. The documentary has already shown plenty of evidence to the contrary by this point, too. Another stark editing choice involves former Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford. After he admits that “I could not have been more wrong in my attitude toward Vietnam,” the film cuts to a crowd applauding. They’re literally applauding a speaker at a Vietnam Veterans Against the War rally at the U.S. Capitol, but cinematically they’re also applauding Clifford — or at least his confession.
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