The Anderson Platoon

A few weeks back I watched "The Anderson Platoon", a 1966 French documentary that follows a U.S. infantry platoon in Vietnam. The hook, for that era, was that the platoon was led by black West Point grad Joseph B. Anderson. The film is well regarded and often praised, but I thought it was a poorly edited mess. 

Yes, there are poignant images (the body of a U.S. soldier we met earlier is left out in the open on a tarp awaiting transport/a chopper crash is caught on film/a GI on leave blows his earnings on a prostitute) but it's all just random images pieced together with little narration and no real sense of a narrative thrust. 

Sure, someone can argue that the documentary mimics the chaos and uncertainty of the Vietnam war itself, but that's academic gobbbledegook; I don't think that was the intent here, I simply think the filmmaker was content to let the film roll without a guiding hand.

I give it a C as a film, a B+ as a historical time capsule.