F.T.A.: Fonda and Sutherland's '72 anti-USO show holds up as companion piece to today's Vietnam film flashbacks
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A-minus
When Jane Fonda appeared on The Late Show with Steven Colbert the other night to promote the re-release of the documentary of the 1972 anti-Vietnam War road show F.T.A., she said that the movie had appeared that year for one week in July in New York and “poof, disappeared.”
To which I thought, “Pshaw,” inasmuch as “pshaw” qualifies as a thought. I was pretty sure I had seen the movie in Toronto when I was in my late teens.
Then-couple Donald Sutherland and Jane Fonda take their anti-war show directly to the soldiers.
A library search recovered a review, on Oct. 5, 1972 in the Globe and Mail by Martin Knelman, which confirmed that it played here at the Uptown 2.
F.T.A. was withdrawn from theatres after a short run. It’s not clear whether that was because of political pressure (the film opened the same week Fonda made her infamous visit to North Vietnam) or just poor reviews. Knelman didn’t care for the documentary’s broad rhetoric and satire, concluding that “propaganda is insulting even when you agree with it.”
The left-wing Los Angeles Free Press concurred, declaring it “not just boring, but painful” to sit through.
From the perspective of a half-century, though, the blunt messaging and corny comedy aren’t what’s truly painful and moving here. That would be the testimonies of all those young Americans who were sent to kill or be killed in a foreign country.
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
Like a rash of contemporary films — The Trial of the Chicago 7, Judas and the Black Messiah and Da Five Bloods — F.T.A. reminds us how much the anti-war and civil rights battles of the past are currently resonant, even when we have our history slightly wrong.
As Fonda points out in her new informative introduction to the newly restored F.T.A., we have a broad impression that college-educated anti-war protestors were at odds with the working-class GIs who were shipped out to fight.
By the early ‘70s, though, the anti-war movement had migrated to inside the machine, and the U.S. occupying army in Vietnam was struggling with insubordination and declining morale. The F.T.A. Show (the Army-originated acronym for the common troop expression, “Fuck the Army,” it was a play on the recruiting slogan promising “fun, travel and adventure”). The F.T.A. Show was conceived as a travelling guerrilla theatre alternative to Bob Hope’s jingoistic and sexist U.S.O. tours.
After a tour of U.S. bases, the F.T.A. Show headed out to the Pacific Rim, where it became the documentary directed and produced by the late Francine Parker, along with Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland.
Its primary audience was the enlisted men and women, who lived on the nearby military bases near where the concerts were staged. The material for the sketches was drawn from hundreds of G.I. publications, mocking military brass, celebrating insubordination and addressing racism and sexism in the military.
The diverse military subjects include bewildered war amputees, local anti-American imperialism protestors in the Philippines, Japan and Okinawa, and soldiers of all kinds. Members of the Women’s Air Force, talking to Fonda, describe how they were treated like camp followers, told they would have access to birth control pills and free abortions, the better to take care of the male soldiers. Black soldiers talk about feeling solidarity with the enemy, seeing Vietnam as a “racist and genocidal war.”
Fonda, who had just finished her Oscar-winning performance in Klute, is the star here, onstage and with the press. But this was a democratic show. Donald Sutherland, her boyfriend at the time, performs a mock sportscast of a firefight, and recites a grim segment of Dalton Trumbo’s 1938 anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun.
Alan Myerson, a founder of the San Francisco improv troupe, The Committee, handles the lion’s share of the comic bits. Holly Near, later a star on the feminist folk music movement, does vaudeville kicks and group songs, including the anti-sexual harassment anthem, Tired of the Bastards Fucking Over Me.
African-American performers., including singer-songwriter Rita Martinson and the poet Pamela Donegan each have memorable solo turns. And if Fonda is the star, the utility man here is folksinger, Len Chandler. He’s best known for the kids’ classic, "Beans in My Ears,” but here he’s singing grown-up tunes, including My Ass Is Mine and I Will Not Bow Down to Genocide.
When a group of drunken protestors try to disrupt the show there’s an onstage standoff on the verge of turning ugly. Chandler shuts them down by leading an audience chorus of, “Move on over or we’ll move on over you,” sung to the melody of John Brown’s Body, in a deft demonstration of how to silence intolerance without violence.
F.T.A. was handsomely restored by Indie/Collect with the support of the Hollywood Foreign Press, which is something positive you can say about the people behind The Golden Globes.
F.T.A. Directed by Francine Parker, with Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, Len Chandler, Alan Myerson, Rita Martinson and Pamela Donegan, is currently available through Fox Theatre’s Virtual Cinema and distributor Kino Lorber. Purchase tickets for home streaming HERE.