There are many good films released around the world every year. Masterpiece celebrates the best of the very best: genuinely superb works of cinema that come with FictionMachine‘s very highest recommendation. If we had our own Criterion Collection, these are the films we would want it to include.

Noted French filmmaker François Truffaut once remarked ‘there is no such thing as an anti-war movie’. His argument was that, while any number of films might claim that war is bad, the moment active combat turns up on screen it becomes too exciting and dramatic for the message to be received. It is easy to name any number of features critical of the senselessness of armed conflict, but it is also easy to discount all of the ones where the human sacrifice is presented as an inherently noble one. I think I may have found one. It is much too late to convince poor François, who died in 1984, but perhaps it might convince a few select readers. The film is Good Morning, Vietnam, directed by Barry Levinson and released in 1987.

On a superficial level it may seem an odd choice of film to praise. It is inspired by the real-life experiences of AFRS disc jockey Adrian Cronauer, who presented early morning radio from Saigon between 1965 and 1966. Cronauer’s own attempt to adapt his experience into a television sitcom reached comedian and actor Robin Williams, who liked the idea enough to rework the idea into a feature film. The events of the film, and Williams’ portrayal of Cronauer himself, bear little resemblance to reality. It is an obvious attempt to develop a framework for Williams’ comedy: his trademark rapid-fire improvisations are broken up and littered throughout a dramatic skeleton. It’s no surprise that on release the Washington Post‘s Hal Hinson dismissed Good Morning, Vietnam as ‘a Robin Williams concert movie welded clumsily onto the plot from an old Danny Kaye picture’.

It is hard to fault Hinson’s reasoning. Honestly I very much doubt that the style of Williams’ repartee would have flown among a 1965 military audience, nor his very 1980s slang teachings to a Saigon English-language class. It is partly through sheer force of personality that Williams can make these elements work. The other part comes down to a remarkably talented supporting cast including Forest Whitaker, Bruno Kirby, Richard Edson, and J.T. Walsh. You cannot build this sort of historically revisionist set-up with just one actor; you need everyone else to react and make it seem believable. Kirby in particular is superb here. Barry Levinson directs the film well, with the design team doing a remarkably good job of making 1980s Bangkok look line 1960s Saigon.

The famously popular on-air hijinks made Good Morning, Vietnam a popular hit in 1987. The film finally resolved a direction for Williams’ acting career. By combining his comedic skills with a dramatic underpinning it led to critically praised performances not only here (scoring an Oscar nomination) but also Dead Poet’s Society (another nomination), The Fisher King (another nomination), and Good Will Hunting (a well-deserved Oscar win for Best Supporting Actor).

The personality developed for Adrian Cronauer – light-hearted but also warm-hearted, with a strong sense of justice and truth-telling – affords Good Morning, Vietnam a storytelling avenue that at the time was essentially unprecedented in American Vietnam war films. The history of the Vietnam war in American cinema can essentially be divided into three stages. In the earliest films, familiar models of war drama cemented during the Second World War were largely recycled with works like A Yank in Vietnam (1964), To the Shores of Hell (1966), and particularly John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968). American soldiers and their war effort are presented as noble and heroic, the enemy is anonymised and dehumanised, and there is a patriotic, largely propagandist sheen applied over the action.

This style of war film is notably disrupted in 1978 by the release of Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter. Here the war loses its patriotic sheen, and the focus turns away from the war itself to the lasting damage it can cause to its American veterans. This more personal and realistic treatment of the war continues through the likes of Apocalypse Now (1979), First Blood (1982), Platoon (1986), and Full Metal Jacket (1987).

With Good Morning, Vietnam the American treatment of the war shifts once again. Cronauer may be in Vietnam, but he is situated in Saigon in the late 1960s – the actual front lines are far away from the comparative safety of his radio station. Free to wander the city, he tries chatting up a local Vietnamese woman, befriends her brother (an excellent Tran Thanh Tung), and even starts teaching an irreverent English language class for the south Vietnamese locals. Here his outgoing personality leads the film into areas that previous films had failed to address.

Vietnam war films had featured Vietnamese characters before, of course, but they were typically stereotyped into sex workers and con artists on one side, and bloodthirsty Viet Cong sadists on the other. In Good Morning, Vietnam we meet ordinary civilians. We visit quiet rural villages. We see Cronauer dining in local establishments and eating Vietnamese food. I may have overlooked an earlier movie, but I am pretty sure Good Morning, Vietnam is the first American war film that remembers that the Vietnamese are real people with human lives and identities. By the end it has even humanised at least one member of the Viet Cong, which seems a remarkable shift; remember this film came out just 20 months after the very racist Rambo: First Blood Part II.

We never get to the frontlines in Good Morning, Vietnam – although there is a terrorist bombing and a brief sojourn into enemy territory. We do see victims: both American and Vietnamese. We see the radio station’s news room, where news reports clatter periodically out of automated typewriters. We see announcements over the course of the film of the American troop commitment rising higher and higher with no apparent results or success. We see a terrible juxtaposition during the film’s conclusion: Cronauer in a jeep, being driven to an outbound aircraft. They drive past fresh recruits on one side, inexperienced and unaware of what lies ahead of them. The drive past the wounded and the dead on the other, some going home to heal and others to be buried.

This is a deceptively simple film. The comedic antics pull their audience into the work, but its treatment of the setting is remarkable and – I think – a lot braver than many of us realised at the time.