278 of 286 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Vietnam seen through the eyes mostly of doctors and nurses!, January 16, 2004
By
Randal Greenwood (Hugoton, KS USA)
This review is from: China Beach (DVD)
China Beach well deserves to be released as are so many lesser series on
DVD by the season or a Box set including all the episodes. It was a
shame it didn't run longer at the time and I don't know what killed it. I
remember it had good ratings and a good fan following. China Beach was a
wonderful drama that ran from 1988 through 1991. It was about an
American base hospital in Vietnam located near China Beach. The beach
itself was used for recreation by recooperating wounded soldiers and
those on leave from combat. The beach itself offered a stark contrast to
the pain and suffering in the hospital on base. It also offered some
nice backgrounds for romantic scenes for the nurses and a chance to get
some of them occasionally into shorts or bathing suits. However do not
think it was some mindless beach movie! This series was a drama that
showed the the lives and efforts of doctors and nurses working in a
hospital in Vietnam. Unlike Mash that came before it, this was serious
drama about the wounded soldiers coming through the hospital and the
doctors, but mostly the nurses that took care of the wounded and
sometimes dying. With some soldiers horribly wounded and suddenly
dealing with the loss of limbs, eyes, and other life changing injuries
there is plenty of drama to keep you interested. Also some of the nurses
of course end up dating soldiers in the field. Like the real Vietnam
the cast had many actresses and actors killed or returned to USA and
some new cast members joined just in it's three seasons. The show itself
was a showcase for the talents particularly of Dana Delaney playing
Colleen McMurphy one of the nurses. She was outstanding and my favorite.
She later on went on to do some Movies such as Wyatt Earp's love affair
in the movie Tombstone, and a sexy role in Exit to Eden a good comedy.
She also was in Fly Away Home, Moon Over Paradore (comedy), and House
sitter. She is one of those women who is beautiful and exciting yet at
the same time not so stunning that she doesn't seem real or obtainable.
She is an earthy redhead you could easily meet and hope to marry. Yet
this woman has an undercurrent of sexiness as seen more in a couple of
her Movies that men only dream of. I guess it boils down to a real
person not so out of reach, but yet facinating.
The other star
of this piece was Robert Picardo who went on to have a long stretch as
the holographic doctor in Start Trek's Voyager series and on some Star
trek Movies as well. lesser known but great in the series were Nan Woods
as Cherry White, Chloe Webb as Laurette Barber and a slew of others. It
was very well done show with a cast of attractive yet real looking
people. It tied in well with the TV series run of Tour of Duty another
series on Vietnam soldiers.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Perhaps the most important show ever on TV, April 1, 2006
By
Tracy Hodson "Awi Usdi" (Down by the Sea, United States)
This review is from: China Beach (DVD)
China Beach set new standards for television realism and quality,
illuminating the daily life of the many women in-country whose stories
had never been told. Created by William Broyles, Jr. and Charles Sacret
Young (Broyles is a Vietnam Vet who has written many things, including
the film "Apollo 13th" and the recent "Jarhead"), "China Beach" gave us
the beautiful but forever damaged nurse Colleen McMurphy (an
extraordinarily luminous Dana Delany), K.C. (Marg Helgenberger) a
prostitute/businesswoman with a past that has compressed her into a
hard, stunning diamond, female soldiers, Red Cross workers, civilians,
journalists--all trying to make their mark and do what had never been
permitted to them before, and of course lots of men in various states of
daily understated acts of bravery (generally called "heroism" by
non-soldiers), profound friendship, love, and terrible physical and
psychic anguish, all desperately trying to deal with who they were in
that place at that time. For those who have only seen Robert Picardo on
"Star Trek: Voyager," he was exceptional in "China Beach" as both a
doctor struggling to accept the draft (many doctors were drafted after
few volunteered) that traded his quiet life as gynecologist and family
man in Boston, to on-the-edge evac hospital surgeon facing wounds no one
had ever seen before (much of our current trauma surgery's technique
was learnt on the fly in Vietnam), and McMurphy's truest, deepest friend
there. The holographic doctor he played never got close to the
intensity of this role, and I hope people who missed China Beach someday
soon get to see how good he could be. Also great were Jeff Kober
(recently seen as the evil magic dealer who hooked Willow on mad mojo on
"Buffy the Vampire Slayer"), as the silent, sensitive uber-grunt,
Dodger; Concetta Tomei as Lila Garreau, the career army Major who has
left nursing behind in order to try to join the ranks but never makes it
to the top; young Nan Woods who, as the "donut dollie" who went to
Vietnam to find her MIA brother, shone as she was transformed from girl
to woman, but who never acted again. I should name them all, and will if
this review gets a DVD to go with it. Suffice to say that few of the
actors on this show ever got to work at such a level again (including
Helgenberger, who may be on the #1- watched show, but whose show isn't
even in the same league).
China Beach was so vivid and compelling that it was actually taken
off the air during Desert Storm out of, apparently, governmental fear
that it would generate anti-war feelings here at home (as though those
feelings didn't already exist). I don't believe any other show has been
taken so seriously. It was cancelled (that it had been on the air was a
miracle in the first place), but with plenty of notice in its third
season, allowing its creators to go into the future of its main
characaters to see how, 25 yrs. later, they were coping (or failing to
cope) with their experiences; it also allowed them to place their
characters in important moments in history that especially affected vets
(such as the Florida Republican Convention where Ron Kovic made his
stand). Its final 2-hr. episode ends, appropriately enough, with a
reunion that goes beyond the reception hall all the way through a long
night drive to the Wall in Washington; we get the pain of Vietnam
brought full circle for us, from McMurphy's first fumbling day
in-country to a day a lifetime later, with all her former
comrades-in-arms with her, weeping in the dawn light at the most
astonishing War Memorial ever built. On the drive, we both see and she
tells the grown daughter of K.C. about her last day at China Beach: "I
stood there watching before I left--and it was exactly the same as the
day I got there," along with the moving story of her last patient on
what is sadly his final day. During her years there we see her go from
genuine optimism about life to paying for that optimism and compassion
almost with her life, then, as with the others, unable to stop paying
and find some capacity for joy again. McMurphy stands in for all those
men and women we lost in one way or another so long ago, so far away,
yet still live among us in varying states of wellness.
Having chosen to begin the show during the months before the war
turned from American hope to American nightmare on 31st Jan 1968(after
Tet and its devestation is over, Major Lila Garreau who is "regular,
career Army" says mournfully, "We've lost our wonderful, wonderful
war."), the creators were able to show how the morale of the soldiers
eroded, how optimism became despair, how an emergency trip home exposes
McMurphy to what's happened back in the World, where everything's both
changed and just the same--she realizes that what's changed is her: she
cannot bear that people are playing tennis as though nothing's wrong;
America's willful myopia has become untenable). This myopia is revealed
in many ways; even Lila's comment illustrates one of the problems of
Vietnam--the generational perception gap that existed on the ground
between the "grunts" in the field and their clueless superior officers
who were still fighting a la WW II. For the grunts, it was never a
"wonderful" war, but a muddy mess of blood and fear and courage despite
it. For the officers, for Washington, it was a mystery that it couldn't
be "won." Any of those so-called grunts could have told them why it
would never be won, but no one asked them, so they slogged on and
through it's intimate style, we're with them, with the nurses and
doctors who have to try to put them back together when an anti-personnel
device made by the VC of nails and screws and sharp bits of metal from a
fallen chopper has torn their bodies apart, or after napalm has burnt
all their flesh off. It's not always comfortable to watch, but doing so
reminds one that this is still what it's like in much of the world (I
always watch the "X-mas, '67, VN" ep on the 25th of December to remind
me of just that), and reminds us that we can't forget. Ever.
CB was a gorgeous show that missed nothing, was completely fearless
(dealing even with the issue of men who by '69 were shooting themselves
in order to get home), and so solidly built on truth and exceptional
performances that it has never been forgotten, either. And the stories
were told with grace, humor, wit, allowing us to experience the joy of
small moments of quiet or wild moments of desperation-tinged fun
suddenly interrupted by incoming mortars. Nor were the Vietnamese
marginalized or made into caricatures. One of the mysteries of this war
is how many of the men fell in love with the people, the country, the
culture (see Robert Olen Butler's books) and how many chose to desert
the army to join it. Their stories are told, as are those of many
Vietnamese. Broyles and Young make sure we don't fool ourselves into
easy thinking, but rather examine the whole story. I doubt they'd be
allowed such freedom in the current political climate. That they were at
all is an exceptional thing. So good was it that many people showed up
to participate: Diane Keaton directed the excellent ep "Fever"; Gary
Sinise directed, Kathy Bates played a key role in one of the "home"
episodes; Chloe Webb, fresh from "Sid and Nancy" was a guest star in the
pilot and 1st 6 eps; and it was here that Mimi Leder became a
director--one whose ER episodes were instantly noticable and who went on
to become the first woman action-film director (though I'd have wanted
her to make different films).
In terms of production values, they were so high that the episode
where a main character, Booney, ends up having to go home was perhaps
the most difficult, challenging, cinematic television episode ever
filmed by that point (1989-90). Its realism is beyond harrowing--one
forgets this is "fiction." Maybe because it really isn't...
I, like another reviewer, still watch all 56 episodes on my tapes,
but would really, really like to see it on DVD, with commentary, footage
from the war perhaps, and more nurses and female soldiers telling their
stories (they did some of this on the show).
It feels nearly criminal to have "Bewitched, season 56" on DVD, but not this show. Please, please get on it! Thank you!!
[For Dana Delany fans, might I recommend "True Women," in which she
plays the real woman who bravely led the women away from Santa Ana's
army in Texas on what was called the Runaway Scrape; "Light Sleeper,"
where her part is small but her performance excellent, and where she
acts again for Paul Schrader, who gave her her first real role in "Patty
Hearst"; "Wild Palms"; and "Choices of the Heart: The Margaret Sanger
Story" (M.S. founded Planned Parenthod and suffered for it). Search on
her name to get a full list, and watch your Premium Channels for
lesser-known movies. She also starred as a Healer in a remake of the
film "Ressurection," which I have on tape from TV, but seems never to
have been sold. Sadly, she never really has gotten the chance to shine
again as she did here. She also writes notes to her fans on the official
Dana Delany fan site, for those who care about such things. It's a site
worth at least a look, as it's warm and caring and a bit unusual.]
I still have old VHS tapes of the show that I recorded over 10 years ago. I sure would like Season sets to replace them.
By far, this is one of the best Drama shows ever put on Television.
The writing was amazing and the cast was top notch. Why Delaney and
Helgenburger didnt become Huge Movies stars after this show, I do not
know.
