SOURCE: "Images of the Western in Selected Vietnam Films," in Continuities in Popular Culture: The Present in the Past & the Past in the Present and Future, edited by Ray B. Browne and Ronald J. Ambrosetti, Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1993, pp. 176-90.

[In the excerpt below, Hug discusses the links and correspondences between Vietnam War films and Hollywood westerns.]

Film makers have often portrayed twentieth-century America at war in images reminiscent of the nation's frontier past. Gary Cooper's Sergeant York, the peaceable, soft-spoken primitive whose skills in the wilderness make him a hero in the trenches, is a son of the Leatherstocking transported to the Western Front. Slim Pickens as the fanatical cowboy bomber pilot of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove begins the nuclear holocaust with an apocalyptic last ride astride a warhead. In more recent films about America at war—those depicting the war in Vietnam—the...