Eyewitness— North Viet Nam is a 43-minute documentary that offers Western moviegoers a rare glimpse of North Viet Nam. Directed and narrated by James Cameron, a left-wing British journalist who last year published a blandly tendentious report about his brief visit to Hanoi and environs, Eyewitness is a loose collection of such random unrevelatory footage as Cameron's cameramen were permitted to expose.
About a third of the film reflects no political bias: shoppers in a busy department store, workers in a modern textile factory. About a third of it is warmly pro-Ho: President Ho Chi Minh himself appears only in stills,...