Brando’s most deliberate choice in his films of the 1960s was his selection of projects with substantial political content. The fruits of his conviction that art and idealism could be combined to beneficial effect led to his roles in The Ugly American (1963), The Chase (1966), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), and Burn! (1969). In each of these films, Brando took risks that expanded his repertoire and undermined conventional divisions between aesthetically powerful and politically meaningful cinema. A few of these revolutionary achievements were recognized at the time, others have never been recognized, but their very existence illuminates the possibilities of a considered era.
THE UGLY AMERICAN
The Ugly American (1963) was the product of Brando’s travels in the 1950s and the reading and research they spurred. Pennebaker Productions had initiated the film, but Brando sold it to Universal Studios in 1962, just before The Ugly American went into production. Brando had never accepted the responsibility of running a film company, and he resented the compromises he had to make as a result of his own failure to take control. Financially strapped by the obligation of supporting two households (Anna Kashfi and Christian, Movita Castaneda and Miko), he was eager to make the deal. Among its components was the promise to make five films for Universal at far less than his established price of $1 million or more. The quality of the films produced under the contract was mixed, ranging from Bedtime Story (1964), a farce inhospitable to his talents, to The Nightcomers (1972), which earned him a BAFTA nomination. The Universal deal included their financing of The Ugly American. The film reflected Brando’s increasing activism in response to American foreign policy, which he believed was inconsistent with the nation’s founding principles. Significantly, The Ugly American and Bedtime Story would be boycotted in the South for the same reasons—his civil rights work.2
Brando’s trips to developing countries for UNICEF, in particular, had complicated his views of American diplomacy and aid programs. Before visiting places such as Guam, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Bali, Brando had been impressed by Western assistance programs. But the more he learned about the ways these programs were implemented, the more convinced he became of their misguidedness. Designed as remedies for Communism, they were often self-serving and ineffective. Worse, he saw American support for anti-Communist dictators in these countries as violating democratic principles while fomenting anti-Americanism. The behavior of Americans abroad, especially members of the diplomatic corps, disturbed him as much as anything else. Their indifference to the customs of the countries, their failure to learn the local languages, and their insularity as they clung to American habits and enclaves countered whatever good intentions they represented.3
The Ugly American drew on all of these themes. The film was based on a 1958 novel by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick, which had been on the New York Times bestseller list for months and was so admired by then-Senator John F. Kennedy that he sent every member of Congress a copy. In stark contrast, William Fulbright, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, denounced the novel (as well as the impending film) on the Senate floor.4 Brando responded with a press conference praising our First Amendment freedoms, which allowed writers and filmmakers to express viewpoints in conflict with powerful officials.
This was typical of Brando’s politics. He was quick to criticize the violation of American ideals and would draw on the American right of freedom of the press for support. He made sure to read widely to take in a range of ideology. He read ambassador Charles W. Thayer’s Diplomat (1959), billed by its publishers as a “corrective” to The Ugly American, to understand the opposing position; State Department specialist James Saxon Childers’s The Nation on the Flying Trapeze (1960), on America’s image in the Middle and Far East; and Community of Fear (1961) by Harrison Brown and James Real on the nuclear arms race, which was central to foreign-policy concerns. He was also reading Mao Tse-tung at the time (which he mentions in audios of his preproduction ideas for the film): On Guerrilla Warfare (1961) and a pamphlet, Talk with the American Correspondent Anna Louise Strong (1961).5
He drew on what he read to revise the Ugly American screenplay, developed themes and storylines, and heavily revised different script drafts. In all of these, Brando focused on three points. First, he insisted that the failures of American strategies in Southeast Asia be exposed.6 Second, he urged an evenhanded treatment of Communists and Americans: “Dramatic concept of cruel communists is cliché. Why are comm. more cruel . . . bloody than 50,000 non com. What is Com.? disease that affects the brain and destroys center of kindness, empathy?—concept is dangerously over simplified—John Wayne. . . . They must be understood, not dispensed with. . . . If we hold as a national policy that Communists are unworthy of a dignified exchange of views and should be summarily dismissed . . . we are left with the last refuge of hopeless violence. Talk is all we have.” Third, he wanted audiences to recognize how foreign affairs affected them: The film should “make people alert about what is going on in the world.” He believed he could only open people’s minds by inspiring thought, through well-paced drama, that drew them in at the start and never lagged.7
Brando’s concern for dramatic authenticity in The Ugly American was fused with political purpose. He wanted the film to highlight the impact of American isolationism and smugness. “We do care, but not enough. If we cared enough, things would be done. The Peace Corps [then-President Kennedy’s invention] would be seven years old instead of one. There would be fourteen other things like the Peace Corps. There wouldn’t be one movie called The Ugly American, there would be fifteen movies, and they would have been made a long time ago.” Throughout his notes and script commentary, he complains about missed opportunities for dramatic excitement and engaging the audience. “The very beginning speech sounds” like “the United Jewish Appeal,” or “an advertisement for SHARE in the New Yorker”; and an ear accustomed to such “speech tunes it out immediately.” He finds the opening desperate for a hook, and he spends pages on this point in his critique of the script: “These early moments are precious and should not be spent on smiling children, buffalo butts, and honking jeeps.” In its place, he recommends crosscuts between Brando’s ambassador at a weekend party—the libertinism of Frederico Fellini’s film La Dolce Vita—and a politically volatile Sarkhan, the film’s fictitious location. “While America has a ball, there’s a communist in the jungle by the side of the road in Sarkhan.” Such an opening would pinpoint the biggest threat to national interests abroad: indifference, symbolized by the citizen “switch[ing] the television dial from [Ambassador] MacWhite’s dramatic report” at the film’s end.8
Brando worries too about the failure to develop The Ugly American’s pivotal friendship between Ambassador MacWhite and the popular Sarkhanese leader, Deong. “The drama hangs,” he says, “on their relationship.” Its collapse is “the main conflict” of the film, yet “in the end you’ve only seen the bitterness and the continuous bitterness and then a resolution of the bitterness. But you’ve never seen something that they had together that they lost.” This echoes consistent remarks on the film as a whole. He writes in the margins of his copy of the Lederer–Burdick novel: “Fault in film is drama is in Chinese.” Elsewhere he observes: “Plague after plague but we don’t know our sin. Story of picture”; “Rambles itself into dramaturgical disrepair”; “Dramatic form wanting, reminded of novel.”9 He warns, “We must be careful not to make the Sarkhanese all smiling and primitive and without anything to reward them as a culture except those elements that were brought in by the Russians and Americans . . . unintentional condescension is what we’ve gotta avoid. In some way, some of the characters must benefit from these people. They must learn something. They must come away with something—MacWhite, Homer.”10
The film did suffer as Brando anticipated, from a source that was more political travelogue than novel, and he was right about the opening (the jeep and buffalo remained) and the failure to show Harrison Carter MacWhite and Deong as young
men together in the Resistance. None of this prevented The Ugly American from being a compelling film, which was partly due to Brando’s devotion to the project. His friend George Englund, who produced and directed the film, noted the way Brando’s “prodigious creative talent” complemented his “command of the technology of movie production.”11 Screenwriter Stewart Stern’s praise was more empathic: “There’s no more monumental talent than Marlon’s, or a more brilliant mind. It’s a mind that comes out of watchfulness. He is the most mistrustful man I’ve ever met, and the most watchful. He can ‘read’ anything. He comprehends the subtext of everything, whether it’s an animal, a book, or a human being. He has the kind of insight that would paralyze me if I had it.”12 Brando advised on casting and scenes, camera angles and techniques and lens sizes, noticing details as minute as someone in the riot scene not “sweat[ing] enough.”
MacWhite was one of Brando’s early characters who was an authority figure: a meditative, bookish, but ambitious and prone to quick judgments. He is charming as he weathers a rocky Senate confirmation hearing, teases his wife, reunites with Deong, singing “Annie Laurie” after many glasses of rice wine. Despite injecting him with charisma, Brando carefully builds the case against the ambassador. MacWhite’s egotism before the Senate committee is pronounced, and his insistence that “whomwhey,” a local vegetable, is “a kosher pickle” (Brando’s line) introduces an imperialism borne out by his inability to grasp why the road he sees as utterly beneficial could appear otherwise to the local population. Brando had wanted his ambassador to be even more compromised.13 With his respect for Sarkhanese customs, knowledge of the language, and plan to mend divisions between local leaders, MacWhite has the right ideas, but his impatience prevents their strategic execution. Brando’s audio commentary shows that he preserved an awareness of the situation’s political complexity as well as respect for the character of the ambassador, a man with sound positions despite his failings and mistakes.
The enemies in the picture . . . [are] MacWhite’s rashness, his inability to perceive the difference between a proud nationalist and a communist, his incapacity to accept a neutralist line as an honest one. He was wrong in calling Deong a communist and Deong was wrong in trusting the communists. Therefore, the naivete of the neutralist also becomes an antagonistic, dramatic element of the story. . . . It’s really difficult to class MacWhite, even with those qualities that he has in the beginning of the picture, as an antagonist, because in the end he’s proved right. This picture says in effect what Dulles always thought, if you’re a neutralist, you’re a goddamn fool, the communists are gonna get ya, they’re gonna eat ya, and this picture proves it. The neutralists may be sincere, but they are ignorant and ineffective. It’s useless to be neutral.14
Still, the point of The Ugly American was that any American strategy would have had poor results. The historical trajectory had been set well before MacWhite’s arrival, which is what Brando had hoped to dramatize in the opening. Cold War polarization, together with general disinterest in the distinct aspirations of foreign peoples, had long prevented sustained cultivation of democracy across the world.
On the Ugly American script, Brando again proved an expert trimmer, with a sure grasp of speech rhythms, and was responsible for many of the film’s best lines. Stewart Stern, who had written the script for Rebel Without a Cause, provided some tour de force speeches, including MacWhite’s disarming prefatory remarks at the Senate hearing: “I have about fifteen pages here which I wrote last night, an explanation of my qualifications, and as I read them over this morning they sound so much like my own eulogy that I’ve decided to let my mother publish them privately after I’m dead.” But he was always open to Brando’s ideas, such as the lines Brando added to the Senate scene to evoke the warmth and intimacy of MacWhite’s friendship with Deong: “I think we discussed whatever good friends talk about, personal things. I think we discussed life, the ladies. As a matter of fact I think we spent most of our time laughing.” On Deong’s character, Brando encapsulated it for MacWhite: “He was a rice farmer, Senator. I think ‘ordinary’ has very little to do with Deong however.” He strengthened the dressing-down MacWhite delivers in his first meeting with embassy staff, breaking in on their squabbling to present “some facts” about the riot at the airport. Noteworthy is that Brando would revise his own revisions, a sign of perfectionism and commitment to verbal vitality. At the scene’s end, he enhanced MacWhite’s irritable dismissal of Joe Bing, “I don’t like bootlicking,” adding: “and uh I don’t like your coarse manners. Now you get yourself together and you get out,” which Stern finished: “uh Bing . . . don’t call me Mac!” Stern confirmed Brando’s valuable improvisation during filming. According to Stern, Brando contributed a great deal to his part, bringing substance and humor to his reunion with Deong and to the exchanges with his wife.15
Brando continuously complained about the scenes between Mac and his wife, Marion (Sandra Church). At the time, he commented: “The love story has no function in this picture. It’s dead weight from the point of view of construction, the advance of the plot, which to my mind is absolutely sacrosanct. Sacred as well is the growth of character—the alteration of character anyway. Nothing in the story has any value really except these two considerations. The love story has no bearing on the story at all. It is an interruption.” He concludes that the wife “plays the dramaturgical butler who brings the calling card of plot from the front door to the bedroom.”16
Seeking to remedy this, Brando rewrote almost all of their first romantic encounter in the bedroom of their new home in Sarkhan to deepen an understanding of MacWhite’s relationships. He excised what was there and replaced it with dialogue that promoted natural interplay with the ambassador’s wife and yielded an appealing scene that also further illuminates the MacWhite–Deong friendship. Brando injected humor and ease, through repartee as well as gestures, like the already noted strategy of using his wife’s toes as a letter holder. MacWhite’s enthusiastic response to Deong’s house gifts and his rush to see him (instead, why not join his wife in bed after a long difficult day worsened by jet lag?) anticipates his overreaction when Deong’s views disappoint him. Thus Brando transformed a dispensable interlude into a subtle instrument of plot development.
The ambassador in The Ugly American was an intellectual whose maturity and elegance distinguished him from Brando’s previous roles. Arrayed in diplomatic white for state occasions, with a pencil-thin mustache, MacWhite’s attractiveness was based in sophistication and success, however limited. MacWhite was also the only Brando character to wear glasses throughout the film, and the actor called attention to them: putting on the large horn-rimmed frames to inspect a map of the region or a photograph, for instance, and removing them to stare intently at a dignitary or a reporter. Brando’s manipulation of the glasses made them symbolic of American diplomatic efforts to see the situation in Southeast Asia clearly, and American diplomacy’s ultimate failure to anticipate the consequences of national policy in the region.17 The film took a complex view of Southeast Asia, eschewing liberal as well as conservative pieties in favor of a position whose prophetic awareness was apparent only after the loss of Vietnam. Reading every sign of independence from Western initiatives as a Communist threat was as misleading as presumptions that developing countries aspired to whatever Americans considered the good life to be.
Brando’s revised script page from The Ugly American. Revisions reproduced by permission of Brando Enterprises, LP.
The parallels to Vietnam were meant to be unmistakable. Vietnam comes up repeatedly in recorded discussions of the film (featuring Brando, George Englund, and executive producer Mel Tucker), and reviewers, like one in the New York Times, didn’t miss it. The Times also praised Brando’s performance, his “solidness and vigor,” concluding that “Mr. Brando moves through the whole picture with authority and intelligence, creating an ‘ugly American’ that provokes dismay but sympathy.” The opinion was echoed by others. Variety said, �
�Brando’s performance is a towering one,” and Brendan Gill in The New Yorker called it “dazzling.” Gill was mesmerized from the start: “He caused me to see at once that no Senatorial adversary stood a chance against him; at the same time, uncannily, he caused me to see that pipe, brains, and breeding would be insufficient and that all this caged energy wearing the conventional disguise of good will, would lead straight to someone’s doom.” Then this further note: “I believed in him heart and soul. A well-tailored, pipe-smoking smooth-looking man of nearly forty, the perfect specimen of an upper-middle class White Protestant American—a Brando creation that seemed utterly purged of whoever Brando himself may be.”
Using his wife’s toes as letter holder. © 1963 Universal Pictures, Courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing LLC.
The Ugly American was the first of two films in which Brando secured parts for his sister Jocelyn in an effort to revive her career after years of blacklisting. Given these circumstances, and their activist family roots, it seemed appropriate that they were together in two of his most political films.18 Jocelyn, another voracious reader, established her own bookstore, The Book Bin, in Pacific Palisades soon after the opening of The Ugly American.19 Following the inclinations of her mother and grandmother, she would become proficient too in an unorthodox but popular form of psychotherapy: an intensive journal-writing method originated by American psychotherapist Ira Progoff, in which patients were instructed to narrate conflicts from both sides, thus probing the other person’s as well as their own perspective. Setting up shop next to her Santa Monica bungalow in a garage remodeled as a studio with her brother’s financial help, Jocelyn would run weekend-long sessions in the Progoff method for groups of patients. She also practiced Christian Science, nondogmatically, as Dodie had done, and retained a lifelong curiosity about alternative medicine.
Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work Page 20