Journey to the End of Hell: Pause at 1 hour and 38 minutes, this person is not anyone!

Five steelworkers stand face-to-face at the blast furnace of a small Pennsylvania town and go deer hunting together. Since this is the Vietnam War, the three of them become soldiers on the front. Two years later, the war is still raging and they find themselves captured in a Vietcong camp. Back home, they are still haunted by the horrors they experienced…

The specter of Vietnam haunts American and American films. One of the first to deal with the trauma of war was Journey to the End of Hell, directed by Michael Cimino in 1978. “My film is not about politics, Vietnam, the United States, it is primarily a story of friends or family and how they survived this tragedy, that is the heart of my film.” He told us in 2013.

Imbued with a strong sense of melancholy, given the best by an extraordinary cast, including Christopher Walken, who deservedly won an Oscar among the five winners, Journey to the End of Hell is one of the greatest films of American cinema and cinema. in general.

The CIA invites itself to the set

And it’s Walken’s scene we’re talking about here: in this case the scene where he’s in a hospital in Saigon, heavily recovering from injuries that aren’t just physical.

Pause at 1:38:24 and look at the character approaching from the right. This is, as we can easily understand, a military doctor who comes to Walken to ask him some questions that will be used to fill out his medical file.

book De Niro: FreedWritten by Guillaume Evin and recently published by Hugo Image reveals a delicious anecdote about this character. “During the shoot, the team also had to deal with the more or less discreet presence of CIA agents who entered the set to monitor the production, which in their eyes was considered suspicious.”

Even if it means having to put up with their presence, Cimino has an idea to ask some of them to appear in the film. So, the real spy plays a doctor during a moving scene in an American hospital in Saigon opposite Christopher Walken.

The man given here was called Thomas H. Becker. He died in September 2017 at the age of 84. He was an analyst for the CIA and DEA, the government agency responsible for the fight against drugs. A US Army veteran, he also starred in two previously unreleased television movies in 1986 and 1987, playing a police officer and a night guard at a juvenile detention center, respectively.