The Ugly American

Harrison MacWhite is appointed ambassador to Sarkhan, an invented country in Southeast Asia. He gets through a hard confirmation hearing in the Senate and goes out to the post believing he understands the region. The country is at a tension on the edge of civil war. MacWhite explains everything that happens purely by the account between America and communism; he will not accept that anti-American feeling might come from a wish for self-determination, and he falls out with his old friend Deong, who leads the opposition. The source is the 1958 novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, a bestseller in America that landed in the middle of the argument about foreign policy. Marlon Brando plays the ambassador. The film was made just before the escalation in Vietnam, and what it said there was what good intentions do when they are joined to ignorance. Some critics found the film too preachy, and others treated its use of an invented country as an evasion. The title of the book has become an idiom.