With Burt Lancaster, Craig Wasson, Marc Singer, Evan C. Kim, Joe Unger, Dolph Sweet, David Clennon, John Megna, Hilly Hicks, Jonathan Goldsmith
Go Tell the Spartans is a 1978 American war film based on Daniel Ford’s 1967 novel Incident at Muc Wa, about U.S. Army military advisors during the early part of the Vietnam War in 1964, a time when Ford was a correspondent in Vietnam for The Nation. It stars Burt Lancaster and was directed by Ted Post.
The film’s title is from Simonides’s epitaph to the three hundred soldiers who died fighting Persian invaders at Thermopylae, Greece: “Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.”
The choice of film’s name thus constitutes a deliberate “spoiler” by the film makers, telling anyone familiar with the source of the quote that the film’s soldier characters – like the Spartans at Thermopylae – had been sent to their deaths.
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