Brando Flicks From Pre-Reagan Salad Days

Comments (0) By Michael Atkinson Tuesday, May 31 2005

Details

The Ugly American
Universal

More About

Perhaps it's little surprise that so many movie artifacts from the post-WW II, pre-Reagan salad days seem to be prophecies of the present, but George Englund's The Ugly American (1963) is a doozy—Marlon Brando plays an idealistic politico sent to set up Yankee shop in a fictional Asian nation, and he can't for the life of him figure out why the natives resent his presence. Adapted from a popular, JFK-beloved novel by Stewart Stern (the writer of Rebel Without a Cause and Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie), the film is shockingly savvy for 1963 and a bruising indictment of American international involvement, as well as nerveless Hollywood banality, today. It comes boxed with three other movies from Brando's underrated mid-career-crisis era: The Appaloosa (1966), a lean, symbol-loaded western about a horse, masculine pride, and frontier potency; A Countess From Hong Kong (1967), Charles Chaplin's final film and a fascinating, bizarrely cast screwball romance; and The Night of the Following Day (1968), a moody, desultory kidnapping-heist-gone-wrong melodrama directed and co-written by nobody Hubert Cornfield, compelling for the performances of Brando, Richard Boone, and Rita Moreno as a depressed trio of self-immolating fuckups.