Heroes is an unusually heartfelt story about a Vietnam veteran who hides his PTSD under a quirky mask of positivity that’s incredibly thought-provoking in its execution.
Henry Winkler, at the height of his Happy Days TV fame, ventured into this underrated gem back in 1977 playing the lead “Jungle” Jack Dunn, a Vietnam veteran on a rather unusual quest. The film begins with Jack escaping from a mental institution with some help from his fellow inmates. The inmates provide additional help in funding Jack’s cross-country quest to realize his dream of starting a worm farm. Jack’s silly idea, which is an obvious metaphor for death for the audience, is taken very seriously by Jack.
Jack’s fervent dedication to this quest will help make sure everything that happened to him in Vietnam wasn’t for nothing.
Although many people may not have heard of this Jeremy Paul Kagan sleeper, Heroes did well at the box office making over $35 million against a small budget of a little over $3 million.
Clearly this was led by Winkler’s loyal legion of Fonzie fans. Although it turned a tidy profit it didn’t hit with the critics. They found it jumped too much between genres. What starts out as a broad comedy, ventures into romance, before ultimately becoming a dark drama that audiences may not have been quite ready for. Even with its PG rating this was heavy stuff for Fonzie fans, or anyone for that matter.
Vietnam as a subject in film had two brief golden periods in Hollywood, one in the late 1970s and another in the mid 1980s.
Both periods were marked with wild success. The Deer Hunter (1978) starring Robert DeNiro, Christopher Walken, and a fresh-faced Meryl Streep won the Oscar for Best Picture while in direct competition the same year with Coming Home, starring Jane Fonda and John Voight.
There was a sharp divide in Hollywood over which Vietnam film should take home the Oscar that year and in typical Hollywood fashion they literally split the difference.
Fonda and Voight took home Best Actress/Actor and The Deer Hunter won Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor for Walken. The following year came Francis Ford Coppola’s epic Vietnam film Apocalypse Now, based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, starring Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando. Apocalypse Now won the Palme d’Or at Cannes (despite being unfinished at the time of its submission) but fell short at the Oscars losing Best Picture to Kramer vs. Kramer.
In the ‘80s Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) had similar success winning Best Picture while helping to launch the careers of many of its young stars including Charlie Sheen (Martin’s son), Willem Dafoe, and Johnny Depp to name only a few. A year later in 1987 came the Kubrick masterpiece Full Metal Jacket, a dark satirical drama, and Good Morning Vietnam which, like Heroes, struck a delicate balance between comedy and war starring the great Robin Williams in the lead.
While many of these films address the PTSD of their lead characters with sobering and even tragic consequences, Heroes beat them all to the party. In fact, Heroes is one of the first movies ever to deal with the post-traumatic stress of Vietnam – on film, that is. TV used the device of the “war-torn” Vietnam Vet in practically every police procedural.
Nearly every other week a “Vet gone crazy” episode popped up on shows like Hawaii Five-0. Books did the same with William Peter Blatty’s satire Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane which came out in 1966 but wasn’t made into a far darker version of his updated novel The Ninth Configuration as a movie until 1980. Fun fact, The Ninth Configuration has the only convincing scene of one man verses an entire bar ever put on film.
A far different one man verses the entire bar takes place in Heroes but with an entirely different result.
To say Vietnam as a subject matter on film was touchy to an American audience during and immediately after the war is an understatement. To put this in perspective, during World War II (1939-1945) there were 241 films made about WWII; but, during Vietnam (1959-1975), there were only two films made about Vietnam. Those two films were both extremely pro (propaganda) Vietnam films, A Yank in Viet-Nam (1964) and The Green Berets starring John Wayne and an extremely young Richard Pryor in one of his earliest roles.
Even in immediate retrospect no one took either of those films seriously as far as what was really happening in Vietnam, especially after watching the constant barrage of television news reports night after night telling a far different story. With Vietnam considered the first “TV war” it stood to reason movie audiences weren’t exactly clamoring to see it up on the big screen. That’s not to say movies didn’t find a way around this: Getting Straight (1970) with Elliott Gould and Candace Bergen was centered around campus protests; Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970) also starring Gould (although set during the Korean War) was another sort of protest of the current war in Vietnam; for that matter so was Star Wars in 1977 which was famously set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
Fun Fact: Getting Straight, Star Wars, and Heroes all feature an at-the-time little known actor named Harrison Ford.
On their cross-country quest Winkler seeks out an old Army buddy played by Harrison Ford in his first post-Star Wars role (another reason the movie did well financially). Although Ford’s work on Heroes was shot prior to Star Wars, it came out after, making the curiosity factor irresistible. For his part as Ken Boyd, Ford actually turns in a sensitive and sympathetic performance. Boyd, in Jack’s master plan, was supposed to be in charge of the rabbits. Worms love rabbit poop apparently and Boyd is a vital part of the operation.
When Jack makes it to see Boyd, he can’t believe how unprepared he is, doesn’t he understand how much everyone needs to pull their weight to make this work? This is the first real sign Jack’s quest is a fool’s errand. As an audience we see the folly long before Jack does. What Jack is truly seeking isn’t worms but rather a reckoning with his trauma.
Heroes is a character-driven road movie that employs many comedic tropes we’ve seen a million times, including the runaway bride who falls in love with Jack played by Sally Field. Field would go on to play the nearly identical role in Smokey and the Bandit with her real-life future love interest, Burt Reynolds, only a year later.
If being on a cross country journey and seeking out old Army buddies only to find disappointment sounds familiar that’s because it is done a lot. Oddly, the character most people associate with war trauma is Rambo. First Blood, the first in the Rambo franchise, would go on to spawn many profitable sequels for Sylvester Stallone. It also solidified the “Vietnam Vet Gone Wild from his Pain” narrative on film.
One of the touchy reasons many Vietnam films drew fair criticism came from the fact nearly every actor portraying a Vietnam veteran not only didn’t go to Vietnam but never served in the military at all. Stallone, like John Wayne before him, never went to war, but made a fortune helping to shape the public’s view of those who did.
For his part, Stallone famously taught girl’s athletics at an American school in Switzerland, while Winkler was in college at Emerson before later attending Yale School of Drama during Vietnam.
Fun fact, Winkler and Stallone were not only good friends having starred in The Lords of Flatbush together but were briefly roommates for a while before Stallone got on his feet in Hollywood. Harrison Ford (also in college) then later married, avoiding Vietnam, but would go on to take the small role of Lucas in Apocalypse Now after his work in Heroes. To be fair few actors playing soldiers ever served but that is far less of a scandal now as there hasn’t been a draft since Vietnam.
Winkler’s performance in Heroes was a far cry from his familiar Fonzie. Jack is rife with faux overconfidence hiding a deep sadness. By the end of the film when he can no longer run from his demons; he starts to lose it, only to be saved by Field. Much like Holden Caufield, the fate of Jack is left up to the viewer. Sally Field seems to have pulled him back from the edge but the story of what will happen to him over the next few decades would still interest me to see. The script (written by Vietnam veteran James Carabatsos, who would later go onto write another, more battle-centric Vietnam film, Hamburger Hill) is a terrific look into a troubled soul.
If you are looking for a war picture with constant battles and bloodshed showing the inhumanity of man this isn’t for you. It’s a film about what becomes of our heroes when they return, how they fit in, and what comes next. Heroes is streaming on several platforms and available on DVD and Blu-ray. It’s worth springing for the Blu-ray as it includes “Carry on My Wayward Son” by Kansas over the end credits. Rights issues have kept this song out of other versions. For obvious reasons this song helps the movie hit you in the feels as originally intended.
Heroes is a hidden gem with a stellar performance by Winkler in the lead; it deserves a second look.
Fred Shahadi is an award-winning filmmaker, playwright, and TV writer living in Los Angeles.
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