The Threatening Sky

A short protest film about the Vietnam War. The film puts the resistance to America in the context of resistances to occupation, like that of occupied Europe against the Nazis, and the heroic endurance of enemy bombing in the tradition of Londoners' endurance of the Blitz. There are sequences of the industrial and agricultural life of Vietnam, when air-raid warnings are sounded and men and women either carry on working regardless or leap into defence with rifles and machine guns. There are shots of the citizens of Hanoi preparing defences against air attack. There are shots of the NLF jungle command HQ, of the primitive traps they were setting over the country and of their captured American arms. There are shots of anti-American riots in Saigon and tales of the computerised planning of the escalation of the war and of blanket bombing by the Pentagon.