The principal combat jeep in the Vietnam era was the new M151 MUTT. The M606 and the Mitsubishi CJ3B-J4C were used by the U.S. military primarily in non-combat roles including delivery, and Navy shore patrol. Thus its appearances here as an Armed Forces Radio vehicle, and Military Police vehicle, may be accurate.
Roger Ebert's review of the film in the Chicago Sun-Times says this about Robin Williams' performance:
"Williams' best movies (Popeye, The World According to Garp, Moscow on the Hudson) are the ones where he is given a well-written character to play and held to the character by a strong director. In his other movies, you can see him trying to do his stand-up act on the screen, trying to use comedy to conceal not only himself from the audience - but even his character....
"What is inspired about Good Morning, Vietnam, which contains far and away the best work Williams has ever done in a movie, is that his own tactics are turned against him. The director, Barry Levinson, has created a character who is a stand-up comic - he's a fast-talking disc jockey on Armed Forces Radio during the Vietnam War, directing a nonstop monologue at the microphone.... Everything in his world is reduced to material for his program.
"But while he's assaulting the microphone, Levinson is doing something fairly subtle in the movie around him. He has populated Good Morning, Vietnam with a lot of character actors who are fairly complicated types, recognizably human, and with the aid of the script they set a trap for Williams. His character is edged into a corner where he must have human emotions, or die.
"The character (named Adrian Cronauer) resists. At one point, his Jeep breaks down in the middle of the jungle in Viet Cong territory (Note: As you can see from the photos here, it's an ambush, not a breakdown.) and he starts using one-liners on the trees. He meets a Vietnamese girl he likes, and uses one-liners on her, too, in a genuine exercise in cynicism because she doesn't understand any of his humor. He runs afoul of top Army brass, who don't approve of his anti-establishment tone on the radio, and he wisecracks at them, too....
"And then things happen. To impress the girl and her brother, he starts teaching an English-language class for the Vietnamese. He finds that he likes them. He witnesses (and barely survives) a particularly gruesome terrorist attack. He gets thrown off the radio. He meets some kids who are going into battle, and who admire him, and in their eyes he sees something that makes him start to take himself a little more seriously. By the end of the movie, Cronauer has turned into a better, deeper, wiser man than he was at the beginning; the movie is the story of his education."
Ken Bushdiecker has some close observations:
"Apparently only one CJ-3B was used to film this movie, except for
perhaps a few frames. Here are a few notes about the Jeep seen in
this movie. The Jeep has a military marking of 2N3597 on the side of the hood.
The number 104867 is on the front bumper. It has a notably
different rear view mirror than is common for the earlier 3-B
Jeeps. Strangely it seems to have the small horn button for an
otherwise obviously late-built Jeep. It has a single electric
wiper motor with no passenger-side wiper. The spring shackles
appear to be silent block.
"In the scene during the Jeep ambush,
they show a floor pan shot of the brakes being applied. This shot
seems to have been taken from an MB model jeep. It shows cast
iron brake pedals. Also overly large holes are seen in the floor
pan. In a few frames when the Jeep is shown upside down you can
see that the upside down rig is not a CJ-3B. I think its a MUTT.
It has a flat skid plate under the front axle. You can see the
same military numbers on the Jeep clips shown after the rollover
scene. However they did otherwise attempt to make the Jeep appear
as a different vehicle by adding the words "MILITARY POLICE" to the
lower W/S and a tailgate cover."
See also CJ-3B's in The Deer Hunter,
in The Killing Fields,
and Platoon.
See CJ-3B Jeeps in Vietnam for photos of the real thing. --Derek Redmond
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