The Last War of Olly Winter

The tube came alive last weeks for an hour and a half as CBS Playhouse startled complacent viewers with TV's first Vietnam war drama.

"The Last War of Olly Winter" Combined a sense of news-broadcast immediacy with Ivan Dixon's powerful portrayal of a Negro sergeant caught in a jungle skirmish. It brought back the best dramatic techniques of TV in the fifties, and was a welcome relief from the thirty-minute-plots we have become accustomed to.

Olly, Winter, an American advisor to a South Vietnamese unit, is a tired man who has been through the Second World War and Korea; he is sick of war, the mud, the jungle, and the killing. Flashbacks paint his past in quick, terse strokes. When he watches the jungle rush beneath his helicopter, be thinks back to a train ride he took with his mother and sister, the countryside slipping by the window; when he stabs a Viet Cong guerrilla (who turns out to be a woman), he remembers being called a sissy in the school playground; when he buries the woman, he recalls his mother's suicide.

Winter lands with a group of South Vietnamese troops, survives a rice-paddy fire-fight, and tries to out-run the Viet Cong through the jungle. He is followed by a Vietnamese beauty (Tina Chen) who saves his life, teaches him the ways of the jungle, falls in love with him. But what a quick re-run of the plot doesn't show is the intricate development of a subtle character.

"When 1 get back to Yonkers," he tells Tina at first, "I'm going to build me a house with an asphalt garden, with no leaves, no trees, no grass and no jungle. I'm going to build it right next to the race track, and I'm going to sit at home all day drinking beer and watching the television."

As he becomes more involved with the girl, he changes his plans--instead of an asphalt garden, he wants a hot-house where he can grow flowers. He also changes his view of the war: "Someone must have all the maps and charts which make this killing worthwhile," he says in the beginning; by the end (he and the girl are shot by the Viet Cong), he is convinced that nothing could make it worthwhile.

TV's standard war flicks cast a Steve Canyon type as the hero of "Rat Patrol," "Combat," and the like. One's immediate response to "The Last War" is that TV has finally told the truth, that someone has finally thrown away the conventional rules about what should and shouldn't be discussed. The plot is somewhat formulaic, and Winter is something of a stereotype--the sensitive youth who grew up on a color-conscious world that killed his mother and kicked him around. But they are not the cliches one expects to find on TV.

In fact, "The Last War" succumbs to only one thoroughly predictable stereotype--that of an immaculately dressed Communist officer who shorts a defenseless old village chief without blinking.

In any case, it is strange and encouraging to see a TV drama linking discrimination at home with a savage war abroad and criticizing both. "The Last War" will definitely not be shown as a propaganda film to service-men abroad.