In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

I really cannot understand how anyone could possibly think this is at all a decent film let alone a good one it is by far and wide one of the worst films I have ever seen on any subject manner including the Vietnam War.The only semi believable character was played by Stan Shaw as Washington the rest including the gunnery Sgt played by R Lee Emery were an absolute joke with Emery being particularly poor almost as if he was deliberately acting being a bad actor with halting poorly delivered dialogue and not even a fraction of how good he would later be in Full Metal Jacket but the man was actually a drill instructor so why he wasn't better at it in this film is beyond me. Whole film felt like a badly written comedy but lacked any actual comedy.... I am aware it was not meant to be a comedy I am just explaining how weirdly the film comes across.In regards to how real the film felt.... nope not one bit with boot camp looking more like a Scout camp than USMC training.Total nonsense that insulted my intelligence, eyes and ears.

What can you say about a war that Franz Kafka might have arranged? It's said in The Boys In Company C. The story is based on the journal of a GI played by James Canning and his four buddies who went through basic training and served as Marines. The other four are Stan Shaw, Andrew Stevens, Craig Wasson, and Michael Lembeck. The five all come from completely different backgrounds and those backgrounds play into how they come to feel as they feel about our military intervention. Not so surprising eventually they all arrive at the same conclusions.Vietnam was a whole lot like how we dealt with China except that we weren't dumb enough to get into a land war there on behalf of Chiang Kai-shek. No we went in by increments and by 1967-68 when the action of this film takes place we had no clear military objective. Our allies whom we fought for were as corrupt a bunch as you could have. Stan Shaw from the Chicago ghetto thought he was street smart and cynical and thought he'd make some crooked drug money while there. The corruption played out with a scene with South Vietnamese general leaves him appalled.There were sure enough real casualties among civilians in Vietnam. But I remember the obsession and reporting of body counts in the news back in the day. This was how we measured success and those on the ground gave them what they asked for. Scott Hylands has a great part as a captain who has really bought into the hype about that.Hylands has another obsession, soccer. He sees a soccer game as a metaphor for war and pretty soon his men pretend to buy into it including our five protagonists. But we even have corruption there as the five soon discover. All five meet different fates in the end and as the postscript explains. Not as well known as Casualties Of War or Platoon. Still The Boys In Company C can certainly lay claim to being THE Vietnam War film.

This is one of the best Vietnam films ever made in the Serious-but-Campy category. It follows a group of jar heads from basic training to their seeing the elephant (Baptism under fire) and beyond. Watching Stan Shaw's character go from a dope-dealing clown to a man with a conscience is great: as well as Andrew Stevens character Pike grow from a young man-child fully into a man. Lee Ermey, as always, is flawless as Sgt.Loyce, and Santos Morales is a stitch (Joo Deed Wut?) See this film at least once, you owe it to all us fools who answered our country's call, and I'll be very surprised if you don't like it, unless you also like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and peed-on potato chips.

I'm a Viet vet from 1969 - 1970, and when the movie first came out in theaters I saw it on the first day (as I recall). At the time I thought it was pretty lame, in that a movie that started out strong dealing with a sweat-dripping depiction of basic training (as we called Boot Camp in the Army); continued with a fairly realistic portrayal of the boredom, ennui, and occasional action of the Nam combat zone; depicted the routine contempt of the lifers and draftees for each other common at the time; then devolved into some kind of weird soccer contest???????????? I mean, what the hell's up with that? It was like a bad splice in the editing room of two movies that had nothing to do with each other. I'm still wondering what the real ending is to "Boys from Company C". Because what I saw sure could not be it. I think that was a screen test ending for the original version of "Bad News Bears".