Eddie Adams photographed 13 wars, Six American Presidents, and every major film star of the last 50 years. History would be changed through his lens. But the person Eddie found hardest to impress was himself. In 1968, in 1/500th of a second Eddie Adams photographed a Saigon police chief, General Nygoc Loan, shooting a Vietcong guerilla point black. Some say that photograph ended the Vietnam War. The photo brought Eddie fame and a Pulitzer, but Eddie was haunted by the man he had vilified. He
would say, 'Two lives were destroyed that day, the victim's and the general.' Others would say three lives were destroyed. Featuring narration by Kiefer Sutherland and a score by Kyle Eastwood and Michael Stevens.
As chock-full of insights -- from Peter Jennings, Peter Arnett, Gordon Parks among others -- it is the famed war photojournalist's works that still create space to be startled, to be rewired.
It's their reminiscences that are the most poignant and revealing about a man who seems, in Cooper's interviews, to have done all he could to conceal himself.
In the documentary An Unlikely Weapon, Adams and people such as Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Morley Safer talk extensively about his career as a photojournalist for The Associated Press and later for Time, Parade and even Penthouse.
Those previously unfamiliar with Eddie Adams will be mostly fascinated and somewhat intrigued, but, for everyone else, An Unlikely Weapon serves merely as a pedantic, Reader's Digest version of Adams' career rather than as truly revealing and illuminating
Documentary about the Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist and celebrity-portrait photographer Eddie Adams, whose image of a 1968 street execution in Saigon became an icon of the Vietnam War.
Adams, one of the great American photojournalists, is more than deserving of a documentary tribute. Unfortunately, for all its good intentions, An Unlikely Weapon is not that documentary
Though Morgan's non-fiction techniques are only serviceably straightforward, the director engagingly makes clear that Adams' most renowned image haunted him but did not, ultimately, define his work.
Photographer Eddie Adams is the subject of Susan Morgan Cooper's incisive documentary about the man who took the picture credited with helping bring an end to the Vietnam War.
The film feels padded even at 85 minutes, but it does effectively bring home the extent to which the infamous image continued to haunt the shutterbug, even decades later.
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