JAMES MCDOWELL IN JIMMY IN SAIGON

PETER MCDOWELL: JIMMY IN SAIGON (2024)

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Exploring the mysterious life and tragic early death of the filmmaker's elder brother, in Saigon

In this very personal debut feature-length documentary, which Peter McDowell completed in his late forties, he explores the mysterious past of his eldest brother, James Austin McDowell, who died at 24 in 1972 in Saigon when Peter was five years old, and whose life seems to have been swept under the carpet by the family. Peter McDowell worked over the space of a decade making this film to find out the story, whose personal significance he also explores here.

Jimmy was a very young soldier drafted into the Vietnam war. "SP4 HHC 20 ENGR BGE VIETNAM," his tombstone reads. The twentieth engineers was a combat division. "The battalion was attached to the 18th Engineer Brigade for most of the war," an online site explains. "With its organic and attached special companies, the battalion constructed airfields and basecamps, conducted land clearing and route clearance operations, built roads and bridges, and supported Special Forces operations." It sounds intense and challenging, not to mention dangerous, but this film doesn't delve into that aspect of Jimmy's Vietnam experience. Vietnam came to mean much more to him than that.

What was Jimmy like when he returned to the US? We don't learn much about that either. Afer his military service ended Jimmy soon returned to Vietnam to live as a civilian. Why? For multiple reasons, apparently. As a youth in Champaign, Illinois he made a homemade movie that we glimpse called Archangel Blues, with other kids as the actors. He was also known as the source of humor in the family, it turned out from letters revealed now that he had not felt he belonged where he grew up, or perhaps the US in general. "I hate the fat, stupid, bourgeois people and the materialism," he said in one letter.

But there obviously was more to it than that in Jimmy's decision to go back to Vietnam. It turns out, perhaps not surprisingly, he had secrets. The telegram informing the family of his death gave infection and heroin addiction as causes.

Brother Peter went back to Saigon a long time after that. Without knowing Vietnamese. He went back again later, knowing much more, including some of the language.

But before we learn much about that venture, Peter describes family dynamics, then his own gay sexuality, whose central relevance gradually emerges. The McDowells were a large, comfortable middle-class Catholic family (their big suburban house is often shown) in Champaign, Illinois. There were six kids. Their mother, who is much a part of this film, as are at times the remaining grownup sisters and brothers, and she speaks very comfortably on camera at two different times of her life (wearing stylish thin red glasses frames). Jimmy, the eldest, she says probably thought there were too many, so he didn't get the attention he wanted.

Jimmy just laughed when she asked him as a teenager if he liked girls or boys. Maybe he didn't know, she says. But Peter explains here that he himself was well aware early on of his own gayness. He came out to his mother when he was only sixteen, and describes the sweet, intimate moment. She rejected the idea. She thought it impossible Peter could be gay, believing such people were alcoholic, miserable losers (a not unusual image of the fifties, when she grew up). Peter being "president of his class" and a happy, smiling individual as shown in photos of that time, couldn't be "like that," she thought. But he was sure he was. He didn't need therapy, she did, he says he told her. (Their father, who died of Alzheimer's and is not heard from here, was a music teacher who knew gay people and got it.). "To her credit," he says, his mother did go to therapy, and over time became "a really loving ally and a vocal gay rights advocate."

This is the framework Peter chooses for moving into his investigation of his brother's story. And this framework is a valid one, though arguably, since he takes nearly a quarter of the film's runtime to get here, he has been, in cinematic terms, a bit coy about it. But Jimmy too obviously was coy, or, as his mother says, "protective of his privacy." He told them in letters some things, not others. He said he was working for a law firm that defended American soldiers in trouble, while writing some columns for the Overseas Weekly.

Pages of typed letters home, not reported on in full detail, suggest that Jimmy was a literate and articulate young man. Though he conceals a lot, he does report that he has "the shits," for which he says opium was "the only cure," and that now he's addicted. Describing a predicted future lifetime of wide international travel, he says he expects to return at the end to Vietnam, that letter ends, "to die with my opium pipe and harem of concubines."

On his first trip, Peter goes to Paris to meet Yves Bletzacker, a journalist who we are told was a good friend of Jim's in Saigon. AS an example of the film's adept blend of live and archival materials, we see both Peter talking to Yves, in English and in French, and the detailed letter Yves penned in French to the family after his young friend's death. He had lived in a Saigon loft with a panoramic city view that his American friend later breifly moved into, then moving out to a remote, poor neighborhood to live with a big Vietnamese family. In that family was "Lily," Luyen, who he had suggested was a romantic interest. But she, in a letter (in Vietnamese) later denied that, explaining Jimmy's friend was not she but her brother Dũng (pronounced "Dyung"), who was heartbroken when Jim died and shattered to be forbidden to visit his body in the Saigon American hospital, which, with breathtaking wisdom, forbad Vietnamese visitors. That is all Yves knows... Peter also goes to a small town in France to see Diep, Yves' Vietnamese ex-wife, who also knew Jim, and tells more. She speaks a lot about how "fragile" he was; you wanted to protect him, she says, but Vietnam was a hard place to protect people.

At last Peter goes to Saigon, 44 years after his elder brother's death there. He likes it right away, but, going around with an interpreter, winds up having a very hard time at this remove of time finding anyone who knew Luyen or Dũng. But he does find where Jim lived with them, and the very house, desite a different numbering system. Later he visits the beach where Jim posed for a photo with the one who may have been the love of his life. The American was 24, the Vietnamese guy 18. That photo appears again and again. It's enshrined by Peter and Jim's mother, as later multiple photos of Jim are enshrined next to ones of Dũng by the latter's sister "so he will not be alone."At

In the US Peter sees Dr. Robert Carolan, Jim's doctor in Vietnam, who says his death of a staph infection from a boil on his backside was tragic because it could have been prevented, had it been treated earlier. He doesn't even think his heroin use had been heavy. A friend of that time says it was.

After eight years' search on the internet, Peter finds Luyen, who immigrated to the US in the nineties, and comes to see her in Des Moines. At last she explains that yes, Jim and Dyung were in love and lived together (not with her), and they had already met when Jim was in the Army and Dyung was a moto driver. But they denied being gay because of prejudices in the country. Dyung died very young, at 40, a heavy drinker and smoker, perhaps sent into a tailspin by Jim's untimely death. And perhaps by the repression. Luyen has said the Vietnamese spit on gays. It turns out her letters to the McDowell family after Jim's death were really written by Dyung and signed with her name, as cover.

Jimmy in Saigon is at once an elegy to the lost brother and the record of a patient exploration that reveals the filmmaker's own identity, not only his gayness, but his love of family and his dedication to the task of exploring it and recording the esploration on film., The film leaves one with a sad feeling of the short life, the tragic bereived lover, and the doctor has called Jim's death "tragic." But did Jim not live his dream and his love to the hilt, leaving behind the country he found unsympathetic for one whose sensuous pleasures he embraced? "One can do a lot of living in a short time," Jim ends one letter.

For himself, Peter says he feels lightened by his research because it has removed dark secrets, casting a purifying light on them. Their mother might not agree so easily, but the impressive work of discovery around a close blood tie reminded me of that great, and personallyl healing 2003 film of family exploration by Nathaniel Kahn, My Architect: A Son's Journey, the "bastard" son's posthumous discovery of, and connection with, his famous father, the great architect Louis Kahn. In Peter McDowell's case, the filmmaker has sought to lift a cloud that hovered over his whole family, while as a gay man he has searched for lost kinship with his mysterous brother. This is a worthy effort that will resonate also with queer people wishing to understand repressive social attitudes toward sexuality that hopefully are fading, but still leave their traces everywhere. In learning about the fraught, semi-hidden gay love, I even thought of Brokeback Mountain.

Jimmy in Saigon, 89 mins., debuted as mentioned at BFI Flare Mar. 19, 2022, showing also in over a dozen LGBTQ+ festivals in 2022 the US and abroad including Frameline (San Francisco) and Newfest (New York). Theatrical release in New York April 25, 2025 and in Los Angeles May 8, 2025.


JAMES MCDOWELL AND TRAN KHANH DUNG IN JIMMY IN SAIGON