.jpg?w=1)
THE UGLY AMERICAN, 1963
The movie about the United Nations that I had intended to make when we organised Pennebaker in 1955 evolved six years later into The Ugly American, which was based on the book by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick. I played a U.S. Ambassador, Harrison Carter Macwhite, a vain and seemingly well-intentioned man who was sent to a fictional country in Southeast Asia and brought with him all the misconceptions and self-interest of the American ruling class. I regarded him as a metaphor of the ways the United States condescendingly and selfishly treated poorer nations in the so-called Third World. In hindsight, I now realize the movie was also a metaphor for all the policies that led to Vietnam and the loss of 58,000 American lives, largely because of the myths about the "Communist Conspiracy" and the "domino theory" that sprang out of the heads of the Dulles brothers...
The Ugly American, 1963
Details
The Ugly American, 1963
LEDERER, William J. and BURDICK, Eugene The Ugly American, New York, 1958, some pages with portions of the text underlined in blue ballpoint pen, with minor annotations in Brando's hand in the margin, including ought to see in the flesh the experience of Communists in action...expose Communist tactic...why not civil war element...make the film cut the romantic throat of every American...check military aid sent by Russ. + of...
LEDERER, William J. and BURDICK, Eugene The Ugly American, New York, 1958, some pages with portions of the text underlined in blue ballpoint pen, with minor annotations in Brando's hand in the margin, including ought to see in the flesh the experience of Communists in action...expose Communist tactic...why not civil war element...make the film cut the romantic throat of every American...check military aid sent by Russ. + of...