The Ugly American
Starring: Marlon Brando, Eiji Okada, Kukrit Pramoj
Director: George Englund
The film: Two books published in the 1950s were particularly prescient in suggesting the intentions of US political and military ambitions in Indochina. The first was Graham Greene's The Quiet American, published in 1955 and followed three years later by The Ugly American, a novel about attempted US containment of communism in the fictional Southeast Asian country of Sarkhan. Written by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, and still in print today, it was adapted for the cinema in 1963.
The film version, although quite different from the book in terms of characterisation and plot, was also very much on the money in its perception of what was just around the corner. (Although the US had troops in Vietnam as early as 1954, the war didn't really get under way for them, at least in the open, until 1965.) And while the film's message is muddled in places, the final few seconds are painfully portentous.
The filmmakers chose Thailand as the location for Sarkhan, since it was about the only country in the region that was completely safe for filming at the time. Thai is often spoken (passably by Marlon Brando at times), and several Thai actors were employed. Most notable among them was Kukrit Pramoj (below with Brando) who plays the prime minister of Sarkhan: in 1975, he became the prime minister of Thailand. Other citizens of Sarkhan are played by a pan-Asian cast, with Japan's Eiji Okada (Hiroshima Mon Amour) playing Brando's revolutionary friend, whom Brando - the newly appointed US ambassador to Sarkhan - suspects of having turned communist.