''Hail, Hero!'' is a 1969

drama film In film and television, drama is a category or genre of narrative fiction (or semi-fiction) intended to be more serious than humorous in tone. The drama of this kind is usually qualified with additional terms that specify its particular ...

directed by David Miller, starring Michael Douglas, Deborah Winters and Peter Strauss. David Manber wrote the screenplay based on the novel by John Weston. The picture was produced by Harold D. Cohen and was the

feature film A feature film or feature-length film (often abbreviated to feature), also called a theatrical film, is a film (Film, motion picture, "movie" or simply “picture”) with a running time long enough to be considered the principal or sole present ...

debut for Douglas and for Peter Strauss.

Plot

During the

Vietnam War The Vietnam War (1 November 1955 – 30 April 1975) was an armed conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia fought between North Vietnam (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) and South Vietnam (Republic of Vietnam) and their allies. North Vietnam w ...

, college student Carl Dixon quits school and joins the Army in hopes of using love, not bullets, to combat the Viet Cong.

Cast

* Michael Douglas as Carl Dixon * Arthur Kennedy as Albert Dixon, Carl's father * Teresa Wright as Santha Dixon, Carl's mother * Peter Strauss as Frank Dixon, Carl's younger brother * John Larch as Mr. Conklin * Charles Drake as Senator Murchiston * Mercer Harris as Jimmy * Deborah Winters as Becky * John Qualen as Billy Hurd * James Nusser as Max

Production

Gordon Lightfoot Gordon Meredith Lightfoot Jr. (November 17, 1938 – May 1, 2023) was a Canadian singer-songwriter who achieved worldwide success and helped define the singer-songwriter era of the 1970s. Widely considered one of Canada's greatest songwriters, ...

contributed two songs to the

soundtrack A soundtrack is a recorded audio signal accompanying and synchronised to the images of a book, drama, motion picture, radio program, television show, television program, or video game; colloquially, a commercially released soundtrack album of m ...

, the title song (co-written with Jerome Moross) and "Wherefore And Why", an "alternate, slightly faster take" of the first track of '' Did She Mention My Name?'' No

soundtrack album A soundtrack album is any album that incorporates music directly recorded from the soundtrack of a particular feature film or television show. The first such album to be commercially released was Walt Disney's ''Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs ( ...

was released. A key scene in the film was changed shortly before the film's release. In both the novel and the film, "Carl spends his last night at home painting the side of his father's barn with a Pop war mural—flowers, bombs, flaming planes and an American flag in which hearts have replaced the stars. In the novel (and in the film before it was ... re-edited), Carl's mother ... and father joined him in this act of affirmation."

Reception

For his performance, Michael Douglas was nominated for Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year – Actor. Upon the film's October 1969 release,

Vincent Canby Vincent Canby (July 27, 1924 – October 15, 2000) was an American film and theatre critic who was the chief film critic for ''The New York Times'' from 1969 until the early 1990s, then its chief theatre critic from 1994 until his death in 2000. ...

wrote:

In ''Hail, Hero!'' you can see
Kirk Douglas Kirk Douglas (born Issur Danielovitch; December 9, 1916 – February 5, 2020) was an American actor and filmmaker. After an impoverished childhood, he made his film debut in '' The Strange Love of Martha Ivers'' (1946) with Barbara Stanwyck. ...
, even younger than he was in '' The Champion'' in 1949, in the person of his 25-year-old son, Michael. This new Douglas has his father's extraordinary, Fearless Fosdick jaw, the suggestion of his dimpled chin and the cool, gentle eyes. He also possesses the almost manic, physical buoyancy that compels attention even when it bears little relation to the circumstances in which the actor finds himself. It's not an especially memorable performance, but it's an energetic one, and without Douglas, ''Hail, Hero!'' would not even be tolerable.

In a retrospective review ''

TV Guide TV Guide is an American digital media In mass communication, digital media is any media (communication), communication media that operates in conjunction with various encoded machine-readable data formats. Digital content can be created, vi ...

'' called it a "talky, uninspired attempt to bring 60s-style 'relevance' to the screen."

References

External links