Long before Carleton Young uttered the phrase in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), Americans have often been content to ‘print the legend’ when it comes to heroism. Designer truth is as crucial to the myth of Donald Trump as fake news. But Andrea Luka Zimmermann reveals that he is not the first Presidential candidate to tailor facts to suit his own purpose in this arresting and deeply troubling profile of James ‘Bo' Gritz, purportedly the most decorated soldier of the Vietnam War, whose recollections don't always tally with official records. However, through her shrewd use of rare archive footage and the kind of reconstructions that onetime Vision Machine colleague Joshua Oppenheimer used in The Act Of Killing (2012), Zimmermann allows viewers to reach their own conclusions about the Green Beret who provided the inspiration for Colonel Kurtz, Hannibal Smith and John Rambo.
Claiming to have killed over 400 people, Gritz is not a man to be messed with. In his time, he has run Special Forces missions in Latin American, trained Mujahedeen fighters and attempted to rescue US POWs in South-East Asia in operations sanctioned by Ronald Reagan and backed by Clint Eastwood and William Shatner. He has also uncovered government complicity in drug trafficking, defused a white supremacist stand-off, set up his own wilderness community and twice run for president. Yet, during the decade she worked on this project, Zimmermann unearths enough evidence to raise doubts and to question the assumptions cherished by millions of Americans.
As much a treatise on violence, the nature of governance and the demise of verifiable facts as a profile of a right-leaning maverick, this suffers slightly from its patchwork structure. But Zimmermann marshals her material (including the original ending of Ted Kotcheff's First Blood, 1982) with relentlessly thought-provoking confidence.