This fascinating film, based on the best-selling 1958 novel by Eugene Burdick, and filmed in the traumatic year of 1963, contains one of Marlin Brando’s best performances. Brando was at the height of his powers, and instinctively knew how to act with his body, making every gesture, every slump of a shoulder or crease of a brow advance the story.
The film is also fascinating from a political point of view. Americans were just starting to experience a series of embarrassing setbacks in foreign policy. They were committed to an immoral and astonishingly stupid policy of supporting dictators and betraying underdogs. Every intelligent and humane person in the U.S. knew this. However, the analysis of the policy’s opponents suffered from some serious flaws. The orthodoxy among critics of American foreign policy was that people like Fidel Castro were merely patriotic national leaders who were being “driven into the arms” of the Soviet Union by the foolish hostility of the White House. This idea was pure nonsense. Castro, and other like him, were clients of the Soviet Union from the start, and tyrants from day one. Their adherence to the Soviet Empire was automatic, and driven by the fundamental evil of their natures. Clever foreign policy might have bought them off, or better yet, allowed their local victims to overthrow them. However, the U.S. State Department did not employ anyone with either brains or principles. Every infantile and corrupt “strategic” step they took, usually justified with smarmy platitudes about “realism”, merely played into the hands of the Soviets and entrenched the soviet clients in power.
In other words, both the proponents and the critics of U.S. foreign policy, at the time, didn”t know what the hell they were talking about. Not surprisingly, shortly after the release of this movie, America began its disastrous war in Vietnam.
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