Marlon Brando was TCM's Star of the Month back in April, and one of the movies that I recorded during that salute is coming up again soon on the TCM schedule. That movie, The Ugly American, will be on tomorrow (May 30) at 5:45 PM.
The Ugly American was filmed in part in Thailand, but the movie makes pains to inform us right at the beginning that any resemblance to real people or events is strictly coincidental. The movie is not actually set in Thailand, but a fictional Southeast Asian country called Sarkan, which is an obvious stand-in for Vietnam, which was divided at the time the movie was made (1962; released in 1963). The Americans are helping the anti-Communist government of the day, by helping them build a paved highway called the "Freedom Road" from the more cosmopolitan capital into the hinterlands. However, many of the locals worry that having such a highway will facilitate bringing in both American troops as well as Communist troops on the other side of the border who are agitating against the western-backed goverment. To that end, locals waylay and kill one of the American truck drivers working on the project.
This is a debacle for the current ambassador, who was just about to finish his tenure in Sarkan anyway. To that end the US Senate is going through the confirmation hearings for a new ambassador. That nominee, Harrison MacWhite (Marlon Brando), has some experiece in Sarkan. He served in World War II and wound up behind the lines with the Sarkanian resistance, which is how he met Deong (Eiji Okada), who is still highly influential with any would-be revolutionaries, not having gone into government after the post-war independence. The Senators are worried that Deong might be aligning himself with the Communists, given his presence at the Bandung Conference. MacWhite doesn't think Deong is a Communist, and he does get confirmed by the Senate.
MacWhite arrives to Sarkan in a very volatile situation, with the arrival at the airport being met by a bunch of demonstrators who then storm the new ambassador's limousine. It's clear that the question of what to do about the Freedom Road is going to be important, and is also serving as a metaphor about what to do about the broader foreign policy in general.
MacWhite tries to talk to everybody about it: Deong, the King, and the Prime Minister, a man who is not without corruption as he's installed a bunch of relatives to important positions; that unsurprisingly being another bone of contention between the government and those who oppose it. There's also Homer Atkins (Pat Hingle), the American engineer who is in charge of getting the Freedom Road built. Atkins has the most logical take on the road. He, having worked with the locals, understands that they really want a hospital built. Atkins says that if the Americans were to fund that hospital and put it where the US wants the Freedom Road to go, the locals will eagerly build the road.
Meanwhile, Deong is trying to play both sides off the other, meeting with the Soviet ambassador, who brings the Chinese ambassador (this is before the fallout between the two countries in the early 1960s). The Communist countries are happy to work at stopping the Freedom Road from being built, and otherwise sowing discord in Sarkan. Deong, however, wants all of this to be done non-violently, while the Communists may be more than willing to stab Deong in the back to get what they want.
In watching The Ugly American, I couldn't help but think of a couple of other movies. One was Crisis, where the revolutionaries may have been sincere at one point but wind up being overtaken by their own desire to remain in power under the thinking that the opponent is just so bad that the alternative must be stopped by any means necessary. Deong, in the end, may not really be either a Communist nor that committed a pro-Westerner; instead, he's someone who wants peace and true independence for the locals, but has to dance with multiple devils to obtain this. There's also shades of King Monkut in all the versions of Anna and the King of Siam, somebody who knows he's up against forces much bigger than he is and can't really do much about it.
How all this is executed on screen, however, feels a bit dated in its treatment. It's way too talky for its own good, and Marlon Brando is I think not the right person to be playing the ambassador. Eiji Okada and Pat Hingle come off much better here in my opinion. Ultimately, The Ugly American is intriguing and thought-provoking, but not quite as good as it might have been.
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