GO AND TELL THE SPARTANS was shot on a budget of barely $1MM just outside of LA. $250K had to be lent to director Ted Post by Burt Lancaster to get the film completed after the producer seems to have had trouble accounting for it. Then just after the NY Film Critics gave the film their coveted award for the year, its distributer went bankrupt, killing the tiny promotion budget, and the film was pulled. Nonetheless GTTS is a masterpiece.<br /><br />Burt Lancaster plays a highly decorated major who will never be promoted for reasons that will only make sense to the perfumed princes of the Pentagon and Hillary Clinton. It is 1962 and with less than 1500 US MAAG advisors in Vietnam, Lancaster is buried in a dead end assignment deep in country that is supposed to be a"low intensity" combat zone,<br /><br />After being ordered to send a green LT, some mercs and ruffpuffs and a burntout NCO on a senseless mission to a deserted former French Army camp at Muc Wa, Lancaster finds his team has created a major concentration of VC and he's going to have to go in and bring them out.<br /><br />A gritty Wendell Mayes script, fine acting by a largely unknown cast and tight direction, set Lancaster's superb work in an ironic context well-suited to a time in which America still believed its Vietnam military presence was "making the world safe for democracy."<br /><br />Some of the same feeling of Republic's undervalued classic--- LITTLE BIGHORN.