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New movie dishonors POWs, family members say

Hollywood is known for taking liberties when it adapts true stories and real lives for the movies, but Tinseltown has gone too far in an upcoming action-adventure movie based on the life of a real Navy pilot, critics say.

In “Rescue Dawn,” scheduled to open July 20, Christian Bale plays Lt. j.g. Dieter Dengler, one of only two naval aviators ever to escape prisoner-of-war camps during the Vietnam War. On Feb. 1, 1966, Dengler was on his very first combat mission in Vietnam, over the Laotian border, when his A-1 Skyraider was hit by anti-aircraft fire and he crash-landed in Laos. He was taken captive by Communist Pathet Lao fighters and imprisoned and tortured along with a few other American, Laotian and Chinese prisoners. After five months, they broke out of the prison. Dengler evaded his captors for 23 days until he was rescued by an Air Force helicopter.

Dengler was awarded the Navy Cross and several other decorations and went on to have a civilian career as a test pilot; he died of Lou Gehrig ’s disease in 2001.

“Rescue Dawn” tells the story of Dengler’s ordeal in Laos, but it “takes liberties that are offensive to anyone who is familiar with the events surrounding the prison break,” wrote a group that includes activists and the POWs’ family members in a letter of protest, a copy of which was provided to Military Times. The letter writers “despise this movie and condemn those who made it.”

Even Dengler, the group wrote, whom Bale and the movie make into a hero, “would have been appalled by the movie had he lived to see it.”

The family members’ objections to “Rescue Dawn” range from what they say are complete misrepresentations of fact to very basic oversights.

In an example on the one extreme: One of the letter writers, Jerry DeBruin, is the brother of Gene DeBruin, played in “Rescue Dawn” by Jeremy Davies. The movie makes Gene into a “Charles Manson-type,” Jerry wrote, uncaring and deranged; the movie’s publicity materials call him “barely sane.” But Jerry writes that, in real life, Gene DeBruin shared his food and blankets with the other prisoners, taught English to a Chinese cellmate and helped come up with the escape plan.

In an example on the other extreme: In “Rescue Dawn,” there are six POWs in the Pathet Lao prison, but during the period the movie dramatizes, there were seven, according to the family members.

And at least one change seems to have been intended to make an even bigger hero out of Dengler: In 1966, after he and a fellow escapee, Duane Martin, approached a Laotian village, Dengler — weak with starvation —ran away and hid while his friend was hacked to death by a machete-wielding villager. But in “Rescue Dawn,” when a villager attacks the Martin character, played by Steve Zahn, Bale’s Dengler tries to help fight him off.

Jerry DeBruin and the other advocates say that changing the story devalues the contributions of all the POWs who suffered in Laos. They sent messages to director Werner Herzog to let him know about their complaints, but they heard nothing back.

Military Times sent the text of the letter to a spokeswoman for MGM, but she made no comment on it. The spokeswoman said she would forward the letter directly to Herzog, but he did not respond.

In publicity materials for “Rescue Dawn” provided by its studio, Herzog seems to stand by his portrayal of Dengler’s fellow prisoners. The director befriended Dengler — “I truly loved the man,” Herzog wrote — and followed him back to Laos to revisit his misadventures in the 1997 documentary, “Little Dieter Needs to Fly.” But after that movie premiered, Dengler was unsatisfied, the press materials said.

Dengler “hadn’t wanted to say anything negative about his fellow prisoners and reveal the true tensions that developed among them in the camp,” MGM’s announcement says. “Fact is, they would have strangled each other in certain moments — if they had a hand free,” Herzog is quoted as saying.