‘Last Days in Vietnam’ is gripping, intense history

There is an iconic photo taken during the frantic evacuation of Saigon that was snapped on April 29, 1975 as the clock was ticking and the North Vietnamese Army was on the doorstep of the city.

It shows fleeing South Vietnamese, who had worked with the United States military, being ushered up a tiny ladder, one by one, into a U.S. military helicopter on a rooftop.

Most people assume the picture was taken at the U.S. Embassy. The rooftop rescue was actually staged a half mile away at an apartment building where a CIA officer lived and worked. He was rescuing co-workers, who would probably be shot by the North Vietnamese in just a matter of hours.

That is just one of the many small-but-significant details about the fall of Saigon that is pulled out into the light in director Rory Kennedy’s gripping, powerful, Oscar-nominated documentary “Last Days in Vietnam,” which is having an encore screening on Sunday by The Tallahassee Film Society.

“I thought they were on top of the Embassy, too, when I started the project,” Kennedy said last November during a phone interview before her appearance at Florida State’s Student Veterans Film Festival. “I thought I knew a lot more than I really did (about the evacuation). But, as I went along, I discovered that there was so much more in here and such rich material.”

Kennedy, who is the daughter of Bobby Kennedy and niece of JFK, is also Tallahassee actress Cheryl Hines’ sister-in-law. Her other documentaries include “Ghosts of Abu Ghraib” (2007) and “Ethel” (2012).

“Last Days in Vietnam” is packed with so many dramatic stories that it often plays like a well-crafted Hollywood war movie.

One of the most nail-biting vignettes is about a South Vietnamese pilot who, when he watched the flocks of U.S. helicopters flying in and out of the U.S. Embassy, commandeered a massive, two-engine Chinook chopper to save his family. Running low on fuel, he flew out into the China Sea in the hopes of landing on the deck of a U.S. battle ship, but the Chinook was far too large for such a maneuver. What to do next?

“It’s a really extraordinary story and I knew we needed to have the visuals to make it strong story-telling,” Kennedy said and then revealed that she had found undeveloped footage of the Chinook gambit. “I knew having real footage was important.”

Kennedy also dug up film of a large plume of black smoke pouring out of the U.S. Embassy on that fateful day in late April. It was produced by the Marine Guards who were ordered to burn one million dollars in cash in less than eight hours because no one could figure out how to transport such a huge mound of money.

War is costly.

Nixon, Martin and Kissinger

“Last Days in Vietnam” features numerous eye-witness accounts of the world’s largest helicopter evacuation, but three of the major players loom large over the documentary.

The first, of course, is President Richard Nixon who, according the documentary, was viewed as a dangerous “madman” by the Communist North Vietnamese. When Nixon was forced to resign from office in August 1974, it emboldened the North Vietnamese Army to move south across the border, no matter what the flimsy Paris Peace Accords of 1973 decreed.

“I think the North would have come down no matter what but the timing of Nixon’s resignation had a lot to do with it,” Kennedy said.

The second is the controversial, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who appears on camera in “Last Days in Vietnam” to give context about the Peace Accords and tell how President Gerald Ford was denied $722 million from Congress for a full-scale rescue mission of the South Vietnamese. Getting Kissinger to sit down and talk was tricky.

“He (Kissinger) was reluctant and he said no originally, but I persisted,” Kennedy said. “What I really needed from him was to tell what was happening in Washington at the time. I didn’t want it to become a film about Kissinger.”

While many critics find it easy to demonize Kissinger, U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin, who died in 1990, is a more difficult figure to paint in black or white. Martin, who lost his only son in the Vietnam War, refused to accept the pending collapse of Saigon and did not OK evacuation plans until the last minute. Even though he sympathized with the South Vietnamese people, his self-denial and inaction condemned many of them to death. Talk about a flawed villain. Or is he really a villain at all?

“He’s a complex character and I treat him as such,” Kennedy said. “He was trying to preserve South Vietnam as a country and I think he held onto some hope that things would be OK.”

If you go

What: The Tallahassee Film Society presents an encore screening of “Last Days in Vietnam.” It runs 98 minutes and is not rated (profanity, violence, disturbing images of war)

When: 2 p.m. Sunday March 29

Where: All Saints Cinema, off Railroad Avenue in the Amtrak rail station

Cost: Free

Contact: 386-4404 or visit tallahasseefilms.com