FTA [Free the Army] *** (1972, Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland) – Classic Movie Review 11,934

‘The show the Pentagon couldn’t stop!’ – but the White House stopped the film show, apparently.

‘Hanoi Jane’ Fonda and her then lover Donald Sutherland bring back the bitter flavour of the anti-Vietnam movement of the early 70s with their fighting-form, Jean-Luc Godard-inspired film, director Francine Parker’s 1972 American documentary film FTA [Free the Army].

FTA is not particularly good as a movie or as propaganda, but it is fascinating as a historical period item. Depending on point of view, it is great to see movie star people doing something they really believe in. Amazingly, Fonda and Sutherland were forgiven, at least in the industry, and carried on working very successfully.

The FTA film follows the FTA Show, a 1971 anti-Vietnam War road show for GIs, as it stops in Hawaii, The Philippines, Okinawa, and Japan, and includes highlights from the show, behind-the-scenes footage, local performers, and interviews with GIs with strong, frank criticism of the war by service members.

It opened in US cinemas in 1972 the same week that Fonda made her controversial trip to Hanoi, North Vietnam. Within a week of its release, American International Pictures (AIP) withdrew it from circulation. Most copies were destroyed. Director Francine Parker alleged: ‘Calls were made from high up in Washington, possibly from the Nixon White House, and the film just disappeared after Sam Arkoff, head of AIP, received a call from the White House.’ But in 2009, David Zeiger finished resurrecting the original film. It was shown publicly in Los Angeles in early 2009 at the American Cinematheque, shown at the IFC Center in New York City and had its broadcast premiere on the Sundance Channel on 23 February 2009.

The film ends with Sutherland reading from Dalton Trumbo’s 1938 novel Johnny Got His Gun.

In April 1970, Fonda, Fred Gardner and Donald Sutherland formed the FTA tour (Free The Army, a play on the troop expression F*ck The Army), an anti-war road show created as a response to Bob Hope’s patriotic and pro-war USO tour. The tour, which Fonda called ‘political vaudeville’, visited military towns along the US West Coast to establish a dialogue with soldiers about their deployments to Vietnam.

Fonda and Sutherland connected romantically in 1970 after they were cast together in the film Klute (1971) but things fizzled out later in Tokyo where they lived together for the first time. It was not long after Sutherland’s relationship with Fonda ended that he met his wife, French Canadian actress Francine Racette, on the set of the Canadian pioneer drama Alien Thunder. They married in 1972 and have three sons: Roeg, Rossif, and Angus Sutherland.

Sutherland recalled: ‘We really believed that change was going to happen. We really believed it. But it was hard. Kennedy was killed, and when Bobby [Kennedy] was killed, and Martin Luther King was killed…’

© Derek Winnert 2022 Classic Movie Review 11,934

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