âF.T.A.â: When Jane Fonda Rocked the U.S. Army
A newly exhumed documentary delves into the actressâs anti-Vietnam vaudeville tour of American military bases in 1972.
Donald Sutherland and Jane Fonda in the 1972 documentary “F.T.A.,” which stood for something ruder than Free the Army.Credit.Kino Lorber
March 4, 2021
âF.T.A.,â an agitprop rockumentary that ran for a week in July 1972, reappears as an exhumed relic, recording the joyfully scurrilous anti-Vietnam War vaudeville led by Jane Fonda that toured the towns outside American military bases in Hawaii, the Philippines and Japan.
The movie, directed by Francine Parker, who produced it along with Fonda and Donald Sutherland, opened the same day that Fondaâs trip to North Vietnam made news. The film, greeted with outrage and consigned to oblivion, has been restored by IndieCollect, and is enjoying a belated second (virtual) run.
Rounding up thousands of men and forcing them to ship out under fear of arrest instead of their own ideological volition created a fractious fighting force at odds with itself, unenthusiastic to resentful to outright insubordinate. A lot of the ordinary guys who weren’t already enlisting against their will soon joined the internal counter-cause after realizing they had been made pawns in a conflict fought over obscure financial imperatives, rather than any pretense of justice. To die face down in a rice paddy defending capitalism just didn’t have the noble luster of upholding all that was right against the dastardly Nazis; Americans understood Vietnam as the country’s first “bad war”, in which the presumed protagonists in the west came to suspect they might be the villains.
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