--- title: "Hearts and Minds" year: 1974 kind: "film" canonical: "https://film.one/film/hearts-and-minds" fi1m_score: 82 critics_score: 78 critics_reviews: 7 published: "2026-09-17T04:50:33.700641+00:00" updated: "2026-09-17T04:51:02.998030+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Hearts and Minds (1974) Directed by Peter Davis · 1h 52m · MPA R · Documentary, War **Fi1m score: 82** · Critics 78 from 7 reviews *In a sentence:* Five presidents, one argument, and a room full of men who used to believe it > Peter Davis’s Vietnam documentary has no narrator and needs none: the archive and the interviews do the arguing between them. It is furious, painful and largely right, and it would rather make you feel ashamed than make you think. See it anyway. ## Synopsis America, 1974, with the war in Vietnam not yet over. Peter Davis’s documentary has no narrator. It sets archive film of five presidents, from Harry S. Truman to Richard Nixon, each explaining why the country must fight, against new interviews with the men who carried the policy out. Clark Clifford, who advised Truman from 1946 to 1950, recalls how it started. Walt Rostow, adviser to Kennedy and Johnson, is asked to justify the war. Georges Bidault, French Foreign Minister in 1954, remembers France losing its own war there. George Coker, a prisoner of war from 1966 to 1973, returns home to a parade. Between them: burning villages, funerals, a football game. ## Review Peter Davis made *Hearts and Minds* in 1974, while the war it is about was still being fought, and he made it without a narrator. Nobody on the soundtrack tells you what to think. There are two kinds of material instead, cut against each other for 112 minutes: archive film of five American presidents, from Harry S. Truman to Richard Nixon, explaining why the country is in Vietnam, and new interviews with the men who carried the explanation out. It is a fine film, and it does not play fair, and it knows it. The interviews are the spine. Clark Clifford, who advised Truman between 1946 and 1950, sits in a good suit and talks about how the thing began. Georges Bidault, French Foreign Minister in 1954, remembers the year France gave up its own war in the same country. Senator J. William Fulbright speaks as the legislator who turned against the war in public. Walt Rostow, who advised Kennedy and Johnson, is asked to make the case for the war and, in the film’s best passage, will not; he wants to know why he should have to, and the camera holds on him while he works out that he has been caught. George Coker, held prisoner from 1966 to 1973, comes home to a parade and addresses a hall of children. Randy Floyd, a former Navy captain, tries to explain what he did over there, and the effort shows. Lennart Malmer shoots these men plainly, in their offices and living rooms, at a middle distance, and lets them finish. The arguing is done in the cutting. Susan Martin and Lynzee Klingman set a president’s promise beside a burning hut, and a veteran’s account of how the war was sold to him beside a small-town football game, coach bellowing, band playing. It is not subtle and it is not meant to be. Each cut says: this is what those words cost. After an hour you begin to see the cuts coming, and they land anyway. We were horrified, and it was not the napalm that did it, though there is napalm. It was the quieter footage: Vietnamese villagers standing in what had been their houses, explaining to the camera, without raised voices, what had happened; a woman at a graveside who has to be held back from the coffin. Davis gives these people time. It is the only place in the film where he is patient, and the patience does more than any of his montage. The unfairness is real. Anyone who supported the war is filmed so that they look foolish or worse, and the film never asks whether a decent person could have believed in it. It is more interested in how Americans feel about what they did than in how the decisions were taken; you leave knowing a great deal about guilt and less about policy. The Vietnamese, meanwhile, are seen grieving and rebuilding, and are rarely asked what they wanted. Most critics forgive all this, and we mostly do too, but it is why the film persuades the already persuaded and infuriates everyone else. Its method, testimony against archive with no controlling voice, has been borrowed by every polemical documentary since, Michael Moore’s included, and mostly borrowed badly. Davis cuts hard but he stays out of the frame and he does not joke. The film is angry in the way a good prosecutor is angry, without raising its voice, and that restraint is what the imitators lost. Watch it knowing what it is: a case for the prosecution, made while the war was still being fought. It will still get to you. It got to us, twice, in the same places. *Fi1m score 82, published 17 September 2026.* ## What the critics say Most critics greet Peter Davis’s documentary as a furious and still relevant account of America in Vietnam. The praise clusters on the method: no narrator, just interviews and archive footage set against each other, with soldiers, villagers and members of the political elite allowed to speak for themselves. Several reviews single out the montage, and the moments where the official case for the war falters under plain questioning. Its influence on later polemical documentaries is noted more than once, usually to the older film’s advantage. The spread is moderate rather than wide, and the reservations concern rigour. Time Out finds it strong on emotion and weak on political analysis, dividing its subjects too neatly into heroes and villains, while Slant Magazine, otherwise admiring, hears it tip at times into ranting. Nobody disputes its force; the question is whether feeling does the work that argument should. ### Reviews we read (7) - **The AV Club**, Nathan Rabin (90/100, inferred): The film wades headfirst into the moral and emotional morass of the Vietnam War through newsreels, clips, and interviews. It bears wrenching witness to the terrible cost of war on both sides and puts a human face on the tragedy. [Read](https://www.avclub.com/hearts-minds-1798197672) - **The Guardian**, Peter Bradshaw (90/100, inferred): The critic calls Peter Davis's re-released 1974 documentary remarkable and a stunning insight into the disillusion of the Vietnam era. He praises the mix of interviews and eyewitness footage, highlighting exquisitely turned moments such as Walt Rostow's reluctance to argue the war's case. [Read](https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2005/nov/11/6) - **The Times**, James Christopher (90/100, inferred): The critic hails the re-released film as one of the most powerful anti-war documentaries, a blistering account of America's Vietnam involvement with no narrator but raw interviews and footage of soldiers and peasants. He notes its inescapable parallels with the Iraq war and praises its political daring in winning an Oscar. [Read](https://www.thetimes.com/comment/register/article/hearts-and-minds-hwltv2dm9kk) - **Empire**, Colin Kennedy (70/100, inferred): The re-issue of this 1974 Oscar-winning documentary remains relevant amid contemporary conflicts, highlighting its influence on later filmmakers like Michael Moore through its collage of testimonies and archive footage without a controlling voiceover. The most indelible elements are the portrayals of ordinary soldiers and villagers alongside haunting images of destruction. [Read](https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/hearts-minds-review/) - **Slant Magazine**, Jeremiah Kipp (70/100, inferred): The incendiary agitprop regards Vietnam as a story of murder, humiliation, xenophobia, cultural brainwashing, and unjustified warmongering. It opens up the psychic wound of a country through powerful human faces and footage, though sometimes veers into unsubtle ranting. [Read](https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/hearts-and-minds/) - **Time Out**, RM (55/100, inferred): The critic finds the Oscar-winning documentary effective at eliciting emotion through interviews and archival footage but criticizes its emphasis on psychological remorse over rigorous political analysis, leading to overly simplistic hero-villain portrayals. [Read](https://www.timeout.com/movies/hearts-and-minds) - **Eye for Film**, Anton Bitel (85/100, inferred): The critic praises the film as a serious, substantial documentary superior in style to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, which it influenced. Davis's masterful use of montage and respectful handling of interviewees from the political elite and ex-soldiers is singled out for delivering a devastating, persuasive critique. [Read](https://www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/review/hearts-and-minds-film-review-by-anton-bitel) ## Details - **Director:** Peter Davis - **Director:** Peter Davis - **Cinematography:** Lennart Malmer - **Editor:** Susan Martin, Lynzee Klingman - **Producer:** Bert Schneider, Peter Davis - **Cast:** Clark Clifford as Self - Aide to President Truman 1946-50; John Foster Dulles as Self (archive footage); Georges Bidault as Self - French Foreign Minister in 1954; Harry S. Truman as Self (archive footage); Dwight D. Eisenhower as Self (archive footage); John F. Kennedy as Self (archive footage); Richard Nixon as Self (archive footage); Lyndon B. Johnson as Self (archive footage) - **Runtime:** 1h 52m - **Certificate (MPA):** R - **Release (the US):** 20 December 1974 - **Genres:** Documentary, War - **Budget:** $1 million - **Box office:** $30,000 ## Where to watch in the US - HBO Max: streaming - Amazon Prime Video: add-on - The Roku Channel: add-on, hd - Hulu: add-on, hd - Apple TV: rent $3.99, hd - Amazon Prime Video: rent $3.99, hd - Apple TV: buy $14.99, hd - Amazon Prime Video: buy $19.99, hd *Checked 2026-09-17.* Also available in: CA, US. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country. ## Awards - Academy Awards 1975: Best Documentary Feature Film (won) ## If you liked this - *The Fog of War* (2003), Fi1m 84: Robert McNamara alone with Errol Morris, offering the defence this film never asked for. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/the-fog-of-war.md) - *Winter Soldier* (1972): Veterans testify to what they did; no archive, no music, just the men talking. - *The Sorrow and the Pity* (1969): Marcel Ophüls on occupied France; longer, fairer, and harder to shake off. - *The Act of Killing* (2012), Fi1m 88: Indonesian death squad men restage their crimes; remorse arrives late, if at all. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/the-act-of-killing.md) - *Little Dieter Needs to Fly* (1997): Herzog walks a former prisoner of war back through Laos; gentler and just as strange. --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. 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