How Sleep the Brave

This is a very emotional movie, one that has stayed with me for decades. I saw this movie in my late teens back in the 80s and it just blew me away. It seemed like it didn't take that much money to make this movie, but what they did with that budget was quite extraordinary. I've watched a lot of Vietnam war movies and none as come quite close to this one for realism, except full metal jacket of course. A true war classic.

How Sleep the Brave is one of the more peculiar offerings from jack-of-all-genres Lindsay Shonteff and his late producer-wife Elizabeth Gray (or 'Lyndon James Swift' and 'Elizabeth Laurie' as they're billed here). Once earmarked as a competent gun for hire filmmaker capable of delivering black and white chillers like Devil Doll and second feature sex films like Permissive, Shonteff's latter day projects tend to be out of time James Bond spoofs, a genre most other filmmakers put to bed at the end of the Sixties. By the early Nineties Shonteff was this genre's one and only practitioner.

A cheapjack Vietnam War epic produced at a time when such a subject spelled poison at the box office, How Sleep the Brave is another demonstration of Shonteff's stunning indifference to trends or public taste. The end result was by and large a financial failure for the director and remains seen by only the few. Gavcrimson encountered a tape of the film at the bottom of a bargain bin under the nonsense re-title 'The Forgotten Parallel'. In a typical tightwad move the (quite literally) bottom of the barrel video distributor had heavily edited the film to fit on a bog standard one hour tape. Despite Shonteff's stated serious intentions which include ending the film with a quote from the commander of the Viet Cong Forces in Vietnam puzzlingly over the suicidal heroism demonstrated by American troops, How Sleep the Brave is bereft of much intelligence and is distinguished from your run of the mill euro-war movie only by its poverty row status. The film was shot in the UK, or more specifically with Berkshire locations posing as Vietnam, an audacious touch that only ultra low-budget practitioners like Shonteff or Mancunian action man Cliff Twemlow would have dared to pull off. A bunch of nobody actors play an inexperienced platoon trapped behind enemy lines and surrounded by the Viet Cong. From a tent in the middle of a field their hot-headed, cigar chomping boss makes a futile attempt to save them by sending out a helicopter. Most of the film alternates between the men bitching to each other about Vietnamese prostitutes and being polished off at the hands of 'Charlie'. You can tell when anything tragic is about to occur because Shonteff insists on scoring every casualty to a 'Greensleeves' type instrumental number. Shonteff also uses his Permissive technique of cryptically flashing forward to the horrors to come, and earns his chops as a low budget man by convincingly passing off leafy English locations as anything but. Unfortunately the latter piece of deception dictates much of How Sleep the Brave be shot in tight close-ups which combined with the sameness of the film's woodland settings makes this a visually repetitious experience. Kitted up in rented soldiers uniforms the Brit actors manage to maintain convincing American accents, but their performances aren't helped by abysmal dialogue like 'I should be at home selling grass, man', as well as a script seemly written by someone in the throws of Tourette's syndrome. The characters all remain clichéd gung-ho action men with little attempt made to get under their skin, nor is there any effort to shed light on the motivations of the Viet Cong. The film invests the Chinese actors with as much personality as extras in a badly dubbed kung-fu film. In the end How Sleep the Brave is about as insightful as a Vietnam recreation by a bunch of paintball enthusiasts, which is sadly what the film often resembles. The fact that it pre-dates 80's Hollywood fixation for Vietnam alongside having Berkshire double as a war zone gives the film a passing curiosity value.. but not enough to warrant tracking it down.

{how sleep the brave};although cheaply made this film is great ,i enjoyed watching it many time and is nice to see a film without all the effects you get these days.also as for acting it may be poor but not as poor as the stars making millions for scrips that are no more than 8 words long at a time and 3 to 4 camera angles a second that just make you dizzy,the film has lots of funny and sad parts and you can relate to how the men must of felt in the war and what it was like to loose close friends,the plot outlines on a platoon of soldiers being sent out to find a village that is hiding VC soldiers and there weapons, the Americans whom for some only have 8 days till they go home are not happy being sent on this mission but are doing it for there captain who has save there lives in the past ,lots of gore and blood if you like that sort of thing and plenty of fire power,finally not the greatest film i agree but well worth a watch if you can still find it,

I watched this movie about 30 times when i was a kid, i recently found it after years of hunting as its a very rare film. Watching it as an adult was like dejavu as i rememmbered most parts of the film, but i can now understand the horrors and politics of that war much better, making it more sad to me nowadays. The plot has not been given any spending power, and the English countryside is obvious, but this shows that there wasnt a plot during the Vietnam war, only the deaths of young men at the hands of eachother. It did make more of an impact on me as a kid but its still a powerful film that will have you looking into the window of the souls of those depicted. If you did see this movie as a kid too, nostalgia at its best.

AKA Once apon a time in Vietnam AKA Combat zone

10/10 for me.

When I first saw this movie(12 yrs old in '82), It Impacted me deeply,

now call that sad if you want to, but this movie did have something. For me,it was the only war movie I had seen at that time that did'nt end up with the yanks overcoming great odds to achieve total victory. In fact it showed a desperate struggle to get the F**K out with your life,Yes,it was shot in some woods in England and it was low budget,with few actors,but it blew me away,it was raw and scary ,and memories of it have stayed with me until this day .Kids today would laugh at its cheap, low budget feel,but I can tell you,this film was the groundwork for all Vietnam movies that would follow. My verdict..

If you were there in the early 80's, it's good........If you were born in the late 80's forget it! Stick with Platoon!!!!!!!!!!