Intrada Soundtrack Forum

November 5, 2002

The Green Berets
Composed and Conducted by Miklos Rozsa
Film Score Monthly FSM Vol. 5 No. 14
Tracks: 31 Total Time = 72:37

Vietnam. John Wayne style.

THE GREEN BERETS. I saw it in 1968. I was in high school, my dad was a career officer in the military. We lived on base so I saw the movie in our base theater.

Yep, there we were, my best friend and I, sitting through THE GREEN BERETS in 1968 surrounded by a bunch of GIs.

Truth be told? I didn’t have a whole lot of opinion about stuff like Vietnam back then. I was more interested in doing things like – well, going to movies after I finished my homework. Sure, I knew there was a war going on. But it was far away. And the Special Forces, the Tet Offensive, massive protests underway? I was a beginner. I only knew what was going on from my dad’s point of view. He was part of it all so I let him deal with it.

I’ll learn what I need to learn watching the movie.

So there I was watching THE GREEN BERETS. All this colorful action and neat jungle stuff and John Wayne in charge. All backed by Miklos Rozsa music. Wow! This is really it!

Funny how things went from there.

I graduated from high school, my best friend joined the military and went straight to – yep, you guessed it - Vietnam. I went off to college, planning on studies by day, movies by night. Why change a good thing? But something got in the way. People protested, campuses got ugly. Even war movies were changing. After awhile my blinders came off and I figured it out. Vietnam was a mess, nothing would be the same again. So the years went by, I graduated from college, my best friend didn’t come home.

Fast forward. Film Score Monthly releases the soundtrack to THE GREEN BERETS in 2002. A trip down memory lane.

I think everyone’s picked apart this movie by now. Vietnam meets THE SANDS OF IWO JIMA, maybe THE ALAMO. What was John Wayne thinking? Whatever, it’s safe to assume he doesn’t think about it anymore.

To get through the movie today you simply have to look at it as an old war movie with a neat jungle setting. It mostly is. The one modifier is David Janssen. To make things topical, he plays a reporter who lets the angry folks back home see things the way John Wayne sees things. It’s that simplistic.

Speaking of simplistic, Rozsa’s part fits right in. He doesn’t monkey with politics at all. His score combines rousing action with sustained suspense and jungle color. That’s where he begins, that’s where he ends.

Funny sidebar. Main and end titles use a then-popular hit song called “The Ballad of the Green Beretsâ€