Hilton Hanoi (1968)
Directed by Gerhard Scheumann / Walter Heynowski
Share on
Synopsis by Clarke Fountain
This decidedly anti-American documentary interviews Vietnam War-era U.S. pilots who were shot down and captured by the Viet Cong. Great pains are taken to show that the airmen are receiving humane treatment from their captors, a claim that was later disproved The prisoners, referred to as "air pirates," are allegedly freely allowed to write and receive letters from home and read box scores of baseball games. While the U.S.'s involvement in that war was certainly a debatable issue, this documentary's insistence that its soldiers were well-treated as prisoners of war was justifiably considered in the U.S. as pure propaganda and an affront to decency. For the record, American prisoners of war were treated quite harshly by their Vietnamese captors.