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The Ugly American Reviews

For those who enjoyed the book, this movie will be a big disappointment. For those who didn't read the book, well, you might enjoy it.

Full Review | Jan 13, 2021

Brando is excellent, as is Okada (notwithstanding his Japanese ethnicity) as the two old friends find themselves on opposing political sides - both right, both wrong

Full Review | Dec 20, 2008

Too talky, conventional, vague and ponderous.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | May 11, 2007

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 17, 2006

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 30, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 22, 2003

The Ugly American

Some of the ambiguities, hypocrisies and perplexities of cold war politics are observed, dramatized and, to a degree, analyzed in The Ugly American. It is a thought-provoking but uneven screen translation taken from, but not in a literal sense based upon, the popular novel by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick.

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Focal figure of the story is an American ambassador (Marlon Brando) to a Southeast Asian nation who, after jumping to conclusions in the course of dealing with an uprising of the natives of that country against the existing regime and what they interpret as Yankee imperialism comes to understand that there is more to modern political revolution than meets the casual or jaundiced bystander’s eye. As a result of his experience, he senses that Americans ‘can’t hope to win the cold war unless we remember what we’re for as well as what we’re against’.

Popular on Variety

Although skillfully and often explosively directed by George Englund and well played by Brando and others in the cast, the film tends to be overly talkative and lethargic in certain areas, vague and confusing in others. Probably the most jarring single flaw is the failure to clarify the exact nature of events during the ultimate upheaval.

Brando’s performance is a towering one; restrained, intelligent and always masculine. Japanese actor Eiji Okada of Hiroshima, mon amour renown, makes a strong impression.

Mass riot scene near the outset of the picture is frighteningly realistic. Art direction is outstanding, with a convincing replica of a Southeast Asian village on the Universal backlot.

• Production: Universal. Director George Englund; Producer George Englund; Screenplay Stewart Stern; Camera Clifford Stine; Editor Ted J. Kent; Music Frank Skinner; Art Director Alexander Golitzen, Alfred Sweeney
• Crew: (Color) Available on VHS. Extract of a review from 1963. Running time: 120 MIN.
• With: Marlon Brando Eiji Okada Sandra Church Arthur Hill Pat Hingle Jocelyn Brando

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Film review – The Ugly American (1963)

The Ugly American , a 1958 novel by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, sold so well Hollywood was obliged to buy the rights and make a big-release movie out of it – though the book is as much a fictionalised essay on the failings of US foreign policy in the late Eisenhower era as it is an actual story.  Several key real-world factors (eg: Castro’s takeover in Cuba) had changed by the time the film came out in 1963.

The book is primarily set in the representative but fictional South East Asian country of Sarkhan, but has chapters about real places like Burma, Vietnam and Cambodia, and sets out to show how the Cold War with the communist bloc was being lost by glad-handing, insular pork barrel American diplomats with no idea about or real interest in the lives of the foreigners they are ostensibly helping, while also giving examples of smaller-scale, mostly private enterprise projects run by American altruists that have a chance of succeeding.  The film simplifies things, concentrates the action in strife-torn Sarkhan where a corrupt regime is building ‘Freedom Road’ through the jungle with American aid (of course, only government officials and Americans have motor vehicles) and the opposition movement, rallying against the ‘military road’, is being infiltrated by Soviet-backed communists.

The film ramps up the book’s underlying message that communists are awfully sneaky, making its Americans well-intentioned naifs rather than greedy clods.  While offering an acute analysis of trends which would lead to fiascos like Vietnam (not to mention Iraq and Afghanistan), it doesn’t acknowledge that by 1963 America was as ready as the reds to get hands dirty – whether by backing counter-revolutionaries or bluntly sending in the troops to oppose revolutionary movements like the one headed in the film by Sarkhanese liberation hero Deong (Eiji Okada).

Directed lumpily by George Englund – producer of oddities like The World, the Flesh and the Devil and Terrorist on Trial and director also of the ‘acid Western’ Zachariah – The Ugly American has a lot of solid, interesting content, but is dramatically lopsided.  A few sequences, mostly those shot in Thailand, are remarkable: an opening coup as communists murder an American engineer working on the Freedom Road project, then make it seem as if he has drunkenly driven a heavy lorry over an incline and ploughed into a local workman who becomes a martyr; a mass demonstration at the airport which gets out of hand as an angry mob besieges and batters a car containing the new US ambassador Harrison MacWhite (Marlon Brando) and his wife (Sandra Church) as he arrives in the country (something similar happened to Vice President Nixon in South America).

However, these are outweighed by long scenes in which people talk exaggeratedly at each other – at the end of one exchange between former wartime friends Deong and MacWhite, the Ambassador regrets that they have both turned into ‘political cartoons’ spouting slogans at each other.  This moment of clarity that doesn’t excuse the fact that two world-class actors have just been absolutely terrible in an exchange of unspeakable lines.

The ugly American of the novel is an honest, homely engineer, here a minor figure (Pat Hingle, Commissioner Gordon in the Burton-Schumacher Batman films) who runs a rural clinic with his wife (Jocelyn Brando, Marlon’s sister).  In an unlikely scene, villagers form a human chain around the clinic to protect the couple from the murderous communists who have infiltrated and commandeered Deong’s revolution.  Of course, the term ‘ugly American’ has come to be identified with an ugliness of attitude rather than person, exemplified by jovial, know-nothing dolt Joe Bing (Judson Pratt) who replaces MacWilliams as Ambassador after the ‘failure’ of his mission.

Kukrit Pramoj, later the actual Prime Minister of Thailand, plays the Prime Minister of Sarkhan, a pro-American with his hand out who comes on like the unpopular tinpots successive US regimes have supported in all corners of the globe.  A key theme of the book is that Soviet diplomats and agitators have a major advantage because they all learn the local language, while Anglophone Americans abroad live in wealthy enclaves and hire servants – this, of course, is dropped in a movie which requires almost everyone to talk English all the time.  Okuda, a hot name after Hiroshima, Mon Amour , is crippled by having to perform in an uncongenial tongue, though Brando – in a role which might contextualise his reading of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now – see-saws between toffee-nosed twittery and powerhouse speech-making.

It ends with another cartoonish moment, which is admittedly effective – cutting away to a bland, affluent American living room as MacWhite delivers an impassioned speech about why America is losing the war of ideas and a bored representative Yank switching the television off.  Made before the Kennedy assassination (prefigured by a climax in which Deong’s supposed best disciple murders him so the communists can completely co-opt his nationalist movement) and US escalation in Vietnam (the Sarkhanese PM cannily ensnares MacWilliams into committing the US fleet lying off his country), this is for all its awkwardnesses a brave film.

A few years later, it would have been impossible to make: in 1965, Lederer and Burdick published a sequel, Sarkhan , in which the country slides further into a Vietnam-like war; Lederer reports Hollywood bidding for the rights ‘stopped abruptly when Washington hinted that if this novel were made into a motion picture, the industry might find it difficult to obtain export licenses.’  Of course, such measures weren’t necessary – like the modern audiences who preferred to see Transformers or Iron Man over In the Valley of Elah or Charlie Wilson’s War , 1963 crowds followed that middle-American TV viewer by not making The Ugly American a hit.  Even if it had outgrossed The Great Escape or Move Over, Darling , it probably wouldn’t have influenced Washington or affected the outcome of the Vietnam War – but the movie still earns a few plaudits for seeing the way the wind was blowing.

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The ugly american.

Directed by George Englund

The most explosive adventure of our time!

An intelligent, articulate scholar, Harrison MacWhite, survives a hostile Senate confirmation hearing at the hands of conservatives to become ambassador to Sarkan, a southeast Asian country where civil war threatens a tense peace. Despite his knowledge, once he's there, MacWhite sees only a dichotomy between the U.S. and Communism. He can't accept that anti-American sentiment might be a longing for self-determination and nationalism. So, he breaks from his friend Deong, a local opposition leader, ignores a foreman's advice about slowing the building of a road, and tries to muscle ahead. What price must the country and his friends pay for him to get some sense?

Marlon Brando Eiji Okada Sandra Church Pat Hingle Arthur Hill Jocelyn Brando Reiko Sato Kukrit Pramoj Judson Pratt George Shibata Philip Ober Carl Benton Reid Judson Laire Yee Tak Yip Frances Helm James Yagi John Daheim Leon Lontoc Bill Stout Stefan Schnabel Simon Scott Stuart Hall

Director Director

George Englund

Producer Producer

Writer writer.

Stewart Stern

Original Writers Original Writers

Eugene Burdick William J. Lederer

Editor Editor

Ted J. Kent

Cinematography Cinematography

Clifford Stine

Stunts Stunts

Paul Baxley John Daheim Carol Daniels Larry Duran George Robotham

Composer Composer

Frank Skinner

Universal International Pictures

Releases by Date

02 apr 1963, 09 aug 1963, releases by country.

• Theatrical 16
• Theatrical NR Certificate #20329

115 mins   More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by 📀 Cammmalot 📀 ★★★

Cinematic Time Capsule 1963 Marathon - Film #14

”If we’re not on the first flight outta here, there’s gonna be hell to pay!”

Can you imagine landing a film role and then finding out that you’ll have to perform in an eight minute drunken debate with Marlon Brando?

I don’t care who you are, that’d scare the hell out of anyone.

And speaking of terrifying…

BONUS POINTS to that stuntman who was in the opening truck crash. I rewound it three times and then examined it frame for frame and I still don’t believe it. What kind of country do we live in that stuntwork like this isn’t considered a major Oscar-worthy category?

”I think you’re a dangerously misinformed man with a sinister notion about what the United States stands for”

Cinematic Time Capsule - 1963 Ranked

Review by kmeaston ★★½ 2

About as gripping as an issue of Foreign Policy magazine.

Review by Quiller ★★★ 2

“If you want to prove to him how right you are, you’re welcome to try.”

Eugene Burdick and William Lederer’s The Ugly American  (1958) is one of those rare novels that directly — and significantly — influenced real-world politics. Its contention that the United States was on the verge of losing the Cold War due to its diplomats’ arrogance and unwillingness to understand Third-World countries on those countries’ own terms had a massive impact on politicians of the era. John F. Kennedy’s promise in his inaugural address that his approach to foreign policy would be to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of…

Review by Stephen M ★★★½ 4

I struggled over my rating here. I found this film maddening in that it at first seems to challenge and expose the real motives of American foreign policy during the Cold War. But then it winds up reinforcing a message about the evils of global Communism near the end.

Set in a fictional Southeast Asian country Sarkhan, which is clearly a stand-in for Vietnam, Marlon Brando plays MacWhite, the new Ambassador. The country is riven with conflict, with the royal government allied with the US who sees it as a bulwark against encroaching Communism and a growing internal rebellion against reliance of US money and goals. A lot of the conflict centers on a highway the US is constructing called…

Review by Tyler MacGregor ★★★ 1

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

There’s a stunt pulled off about 5 minutes in that actually made me jump out of my seat and yell “HOLY SHIT." I can’t even begin to fathom how they pulled it off without actually killing a man. That’s a feeling I rarely, rarely feel watching movies today. Unfortunately the film never quite reached that level of hype from me again. I credit it for being very blunt in what it had to say about American foreign policy during a very tumultuous point in history, but it’s storytelling is just so plain and unremarkable. Scene after scene of characters discussing plot and themes with little variation or nuance. None of the actors are really bad, but Marlon Brando is the…

Review by Fint ★★★ 1

Brando sweats! Marlon has put as much attention to the droplets on his brow and the damp stains on his shirts as to his acting in this Saigon-in-all-but-name political drama. Actually, mentioning those whiffs of humidity is unfair to his performance which has flashes of his habitual intensity. The problem is him acting opposite performers who don’t approach his talent. It’s like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. 

All the way through, I was unsure if The Ugly American  was going to defend or condemn Vietnam-style intervention. Brando’s Ambassador character certainly spouts some ugly ideology but the film seems critical of his once friend, now opponent, whom he brands a Communist. There is one long dialogue scene between the two which could have…

Review by Xebeche ★★★½

This movie has absolutely no problem announcing that force-fed democracy abroad is just a smokescreen for financial and militaristic gain. For a movie that was made when the Cold War was at a fever pitch, The Ugly American is admirably blunt and decidedly un-American (by McCarthy's standards). One scene shows a drunken debate between our two leads, Marlon Brando and Eiji Okada, who play old friends torn apart by the interests of the parties they represent. Their argument is an impassioned deconstruction of American naivety, communist paranoia, and every other facet of their competing ideals. The movie has a few of the trappings of American exceptionalism, there's not much of an emotional throughline, and the "prestige picture" efforts are underwhelming, but it exhibits so much empathy and finger-wagging that it has a special "time and place" quality that's worthy of preservation.

Scavenger Hunt 58 3/31

Review by Justin Decloux ★★★

A movie about the Vietnam war, starring Marlon Brandon, directed by the man behind the weirdo western ZACHARIA!?

Ah, it's too good to be true.

A respectable, but straight-faced, tale about how a country's people AREN'T COMMUNISTS, but just want to have the same freedom the good old US of A has. NOT COMMUNISTS. Also, Americans in power are dumb and wrong. Nothing new here folks. Move along.

Review by Marie

entering TCM fugue state. totally locked in. did I dream an entirely new Brando movie. or did I just lose 2 hours on a slightly limp foreign-policy not-quite-critique not-quite-epic that he was sleepwalking through, as an actor. if so it makes sense that I would include his hot moustache from this era

Review by Gabe Rodríguez ★★★★½

"Pretty soon, this country, Sarkhan, is going to end up just the way Cuba did." "Cuba? Cuba is what you've made it."

THE UGLY AMERICAN is a film I’ve always felt is criminally underrated, to the point that I think it should have at least received a Best Picture nomination for 1963. It’s a very in-depth (for its time) look at the failures of US diplomacy.

The film is based on a 1958 novel that caused a lot of political scandal when published; in fact, the Peace Corps was established by the Kennedy administration partly as a result of the book. Though, from what I’ve read, the film is a very loose adaptation.

Harrison MacWhite (Marlon Brando) is made the…

Review by Grandt from Savages ★★

This has its merit, and GOD DAMN was that car stunt in the opening something else. That one guy almost died.

Review by Sed. Dine ★★★★

The ugliness of being so underrated ...

Like other cinematic oddities as "A Face in the Crowd" or "Johnny Guitar", "The Ugly American" invites for several questionings. Why didn't the film get much more recognition? Why did it fail to reach the same status as a lesser movie like "The Sound of Music"? Why even those who pretend to be movie fans tend to overlook it or didn't even hear about the title? Is it because it's a Marlon Brando picture that is not from the 50's or the 70's? Is it the title? The unknown director: who ever heard of George Englund anyway? The exotic setting that makes it look like another mindless escapist movie?

In fact, the only…

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The Ugly American (1963)

The Ugly American movie storyline. An intelligent, articulate scholar, Harrison MacWhite, survives a hostile Senate confirmation hearing at the hands of conservatives to become ambassador to Sarkan, a southeast Asian country where civil war threatens a tense peace. Despite his knowledge, once he’s there, MacWhite sees only a dichotomy between the U.S. and Communism.

He can’t accept that anti-American sentiment might be a longing for self-determination and nationalism. So, he breaks from his friend Deong, a local opposition leader, ignores a foreman’s advice about slowing the building of a road, and tries to muscle ahead. What price must the country and his friends pay for him to get some sense?

The Ugly American is a 1963 American adventure film directed by George Englund, written by Stewart Stern, and starring Marlon Brando, Sandra Church, Eiji Okada, Pat Hingle, Judson Pratt and Arthur Hill. It is based on the 1958 novel The Ugly American by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer. The film was released on April 2, 1963, by Universal Pictures.

Film Review for The Ugly American

Some of the ambiguities, hypocrisies and perplexities of cold war politics are observed, dramatized and, to a degree, analyzed in The Ugly American. It is a thought-provoking but uneven screen translation taken from, but not in a literal sense based upon, the popular novel by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick.

Focal figure of the story is an American ambassador (Marlon Brando) to a Southeast Asian nation who, after jumping to conclusions in the course of dealing with an uprising of the natives of that country against the existing regime and what they interpret as Yankee imperialism comes to understand that there is more to modern political revolution than meets the casual or jaundiced bystander’s eye. As a result of his experience, he senses that Americans ‘can’t hope to win the cold war unless we remember what we’re for as well as what we’re against’.

Although skillfully and often explosively directed by George Englund and well played by Brando and others in the cast, the film tends to be overly talkative and lethargic in certain areas, vague and confusing in others. Probably the most jarring single flaw is the failure to clarify the exact nature of events during the ultimate upheaval.

Brando’s performance is a towering one; restrained, intelligent and always masculine. Japanese actor Eiji Okada of Hiroshima, mon amour renown, makes a strong impression. Mass riot scene near the outset of the picture is frighteningly realistic. Art direction is outstanding, with a convincing replica of a Southeast Asian village on the Universal backlot.

Highly controversial, filming in Thailand was okayed only after intervention from President John F. Kennedy. Kukrit Pramoj, who plays Kwen Sai, the prime minister of fictional Sarkhan and served as the film’s technical consultant, later went on to become Thailand’s real-life premier. These bits of trivia provide some additional context for this cold war drama (set in 1960) in which Marlon Brando plays the ugly American of the title, as Ambassador MacWhite to Sarkhan – a fictional country that could pass for any one of a number of real Asian nations.

It’s been 15 years since MacWhite was last in Sarkhan, and his old friend Deong (Eiji Okada) was and is an influential figure. But now, to MacWhite’s bitter disappointment, Deong seems to have shifted his political stance and resents what he sees as America’s imperialist moves. MacWhite sees things differently; he sees America helping to keep Communism out of Sarkhan … The themes of American foreign policy in Asia are crucial to the plot, but since the film is meant to be mass entertainment, the detail is less than comprehensive and the result is a political thriller in an exotic setting. And with honourable intent. It’s relevance is ongoing.

Brando is excellent, as is Okada (notwithstanding his Japanese ethnicity) as the two old friends find themselves on opposing political sides – both right, both wrong. Also notable is Sandra Church as Mrs MacWhite, and the entire supporting cast.

Directed by: George Englund Starring: Marlon Brando, Eiji Okada, Sandra Church, Pat Hingle, Arthur Hill, Jocelyn Brando, Kukrit Pramoj, Judson Pratt, Reiko Sato, George Shibata, Judson Laire, Philip Ober Screenplay by: Stewart Stern Production Design by: Marshall Green Cinematography by: Clifford Stine Film Editing by: Ted J. Kent Costume Design by: Rosemary Odell Set Decoration by: Oliver Emert Art Direction by: Alexander Golitzen, Alfred Sweeney Music by: Frank Skinner MPAA Rating: None. Distributed by: Universal Pictures Release Date: April 2, 1963

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The Ugly American (1963)

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The most explosive adventure of our time!

An intelligent, articulate scholar, Harrison MacWhite, survives a hostile Senate confirmation hearing at the hands of conservatives to become ambassador to Sarkan, a southeast Asian country where civil war threatens a tense peace. Despite his knowledge, once he's there, MacWhite sees only a dichotomy between the U.S. and Communism. He can't accept that anti-American sentiment might be a longing for self-determination and nationalism. So, he breaks from his friend Deong, a local opposition leader, ignores a foreman's advice about slowing the building of a road, and tries to muscle ahead. What price must the country and his friends pay for him to get some sense?

George Englund

William J. Lederer

Eugene Burdick

Stewart Stern

Top Billed Cast

Marlon Brando

Ambassador Harrison Carter MacWhite

Sandra Church

Marion MacWhite

Homer Atkins

Arthur Hill

Jocelyn Brando

Emma Atkins

Rachani, Deong's Wife

Kukrit Pramoj

Prime Minister Kwen Sai

Judson Pratt

Full Cast & Crew

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A review by Wuchak

Written by wuchak on march 8, 2020.

Why the Vietnam War happened

Based on influential 1958 American political novel, “The Ugly American” (1963) is a realistic film, a political drama/thriller featuring Marlon Brando as a new American diplomat in a Vietnam-like Southeast Asian nation that is painfully struggling between capitalist & communist factions. Eiji Okada plays the country's revolutionary leader, a previous best-friend of MacWhite (Brando) who may be brainwashed by the communists. The ending cleverly shows how the average American is unconcerned with the political conflicts of distant nations.

Produced and dire... read the rest.

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• southeast asia
• fictitious country
• u.s. ambassador

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The Ugly American (1963)

Directed by george englund.

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The Ugly American is a 1963 American adventure film directed by George Englund and written by Stewart Stern. It is based on the 1958 novel The Ugly American by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer. The film stars Marlon Brando, Sandra Church, Eiji Okada, Pat Hingle, Judson Pratt and Arthur Hill. The film was released on April 2, 1963, by Universal Pictures.

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Still ‘Ugly’ After All These Years

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By Michael Meyer

• July 10, 2009

In the annals of misunderstood titles, a special place belongs to William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick’s novel “The Ugly American.” Today, the phrase is shorthand for our compatriots who wear tube tops to the Vatican or shout for Big Macs in Beijing. But as summer vacation season begins (at least for those who can still afford it), it’s worth recalling that the impolitic travelers in “The Ugly American” aren’t drunken backpackers or seniors sporting black socks, but the so-called educated elite of the diplomatic corps, whose insensitivity to local language and customs prompts observations like this:

“The simple fact is, Mr. Ambassador, that average Americans, in their natural state, if you will excuse the phrase, are the best ambassadors a country can have,” a Filipino minister tells an American official. “They are not suspicious, they are eager to share their skills, they are generous. But something happens to most Americans when they go abroad. Many of them are not average . . . they are second-raters.”

Published in 1958, the book is often confused with another cold-war-era novel set in Southeast Asia, “The Quiet American,” which appeared in 1955. Yet “The Ugly American,” which depicted the struggle against insurgent Communism in the fictional nation of Sarkhan, was the bigger success, spending 76 weeks on the best-seller list and selling roughly five million copies. Writing in the Book Review, the veteran correspondent Robert Trumbull called it a “devastating indictment of American policy” and a “source of insight into the actual, day-by-day byplay of present titanic political struggle for Asia.”

The novel is a series of linked sketches of real people that Lederer, a Navy captain who served as special assistant to the commander in chief of United States forces in the Pacific and Asian theater, and Burdick, a political scientist, encountered overseas during the buildup to Vietnam. The book was originally commissioned by W. W. Norton as nonfiction, but an editor suggested it might be more effective as a novel. “What we have written is not just an angry dream,” the authors note in the introduction, “but rather the rendering of fact into fiction.” Yet the book’s enduring resonance may say less about its literary merits than about its failure to change American attitudes. Today, as the battle for hearts and minds has shifted to the Middle East, we still can’t speak Sarkhanese.

In “The Ugly American,” Ambassador “Lucky” Lou Sears stews in his luxurious compound in the capital, fuming over his Soviet counterpart’s latest checkmate. “The American ambassador is a jewel,” the Soviet diplomat — who is fluent in the local language, customs and religion — cables Moscow. “He keeps his people tied up with meetings, social events, and greeting and briefing the scores of senators, congressmen, generals, admirals, under secretaries of state and defense, and so on, who come pouring through here to ‘look for themselves.’ ” Sears undermines a Wisconsin dairyman’s self-started project to raise nutrition levels in the Sarkhan country­side, thwarts a band of anti-Communist irregulars formed by a militant Massachusetts priest, and orchestrates the dismissal of his more capable successor, who fails to convince Washington of an impending coup.

The Ugly American of the title is not one of these bunglers, but the book’s hero, a millionaire engineer named Homer Atkins, whose calloused and grease-blackened hands “always reminded him that he was an ugly man.” Homer is the very model of the enlightened ambassador (lowercase) the authors thought America should send into the world. He and his wife become a proto-Peace Corps couple, homesteading in an earthen-floored hut and collaborating with villagers on inventions like a bicycle-powered irrigation pump. Homer’s voice sounds surprisingly contemporary, as if he’s channeling “Dead Aid,” Dambisa Moyo’s recent polemic against current global development practices. “Whenever you give a man something for nothing,” Homer warns, “the first person he comes to dislike is you.”

“Our aim is not to embarrass individuals,” the authors declared in their introduction, “but to stimulate thought — and, we hope, action.” One person it inspired was John F. Kennedy, who mailed a copy of “The Ugly American” to each of his Senate colleagues. The book’s epilogue argues for the creation of “a small force of well-trained, well-chosen, hard-working and dedicated professionals” fluent in the local language — not unlike the Peace Corps, which Kennedy proposed in 1960.

For the earliest volunteers, “The Ugly American” provided a sort of how-not-to-travel guide. “When I was in college in the late ’50s, everyone was reading ‘The Organization Man,’ and plotting ways to get ahead in corporate life,” John Coyne, a co-founder of the unofficial Web site Peace Corps Worldwide, said in an e-mail message. “But some of us were reading ‘The Ugly American’ instead.”

Coyne left for Ethiopia in 1962. The following year, Paul Theroux arrived as a volunteer in Malawi. “ ‘The Ugly American’ was well known even by people who hadn’t read it,” Theroux said via text message while hiking in Portugal. “Because of the book, the Peace Corps was at pains to teach volunteers the host-country language. I was able to speak Chichewa well enough to hold lively conversations the day I arrived.”

By the time I was sent to China as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1995, “ugly American” was just a catchphrase, though China’s past suspicions of this supposed imperialist tool meant that officially I was not in the Peace Corps at all, but a “U.S.-China Friendship Volunteer.” I got intensive language training, yet some things had not changed since Lederer and Burdick’s era. In the novel, the American ambassador is incensed by an editorial cartoon showing him leading a Sarkhanese on a leash to a billboard for Coca-Cola. During my first month in China, a skeptical American diplomat said my real assignment was to “create future customers for Pepsi.” (Mission accomplished!)

But the book’s most enduring legacy is its argument that “we spend billions on the wrong aid projects while overlooking the almost costless and far more helpful ones,” which could serve as an unwieldy subtitle to the books of Rory Stewart, who chronicled his solo walk across war-torn Afghanistan in “The Places in Between” and described his year as a deputy provincial governor in Iraq under the British administration in “The Prince of the Marshes.” Stewart criticizes well-meaning Western policy makers who arrive in country with notions of “capacity building” and “democratization” but little local knowledge and even less patience.

“Many people don’t want to sit with a village leader in a tent and eat with their hands,” Stewart said by phone from Cambridge, Mass., where he is the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “It’s much easier to announce an initiative to ‘stabilize Afghanistan.’ There’s a lack of realism.”

A half century after “The Ugly American,” the United States has another young president urging us to connect with the wider world, only this time he has lived in it. “I know that the stereotypes of the United States are out there,” Barack Obama recently told university students in Istanbul. “And I know that many of them are informed not by direct exchange or dialogue, but by television shows and movies and misinformation.”

Lederer and Burdick would most likely respond that no matter how cosmopolitan a superpower’s leadership, foreign opinion is also informed by its actions, or lack thereof. Obama’s 2010 budget proposes increasing the Peace Corps’s financing by 10 percent, to $373 million, though that will not come close to covering his proposal to double the number of volunteers to roughly 16,000, close to the 1965 peak. As Mark Gearan, a former Peace Corps director, lamented to The Boston Globe, “We spend more on the military marching bands.”

The Peace Corps is not a panacea, but when it comes to projecting America’s values abroad, its spirit comes closest to what the fictional Homer Atkins advocated decades before that global symbol of a different kind of ugly Americanism, Homer Simpson, told his children: “You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.”

Michael Meyer’s book, “The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed,” was recently published in paperback.

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The Ugly American

• An ambitious American scholar becomes the ambassador to Sarkan, a southeast Asian country where civil war is brewing.
• An intelligent, articulate scholar, Harrison MacWhite, survives a hostile Senate confirmation hearing at the hands of conservatives to become ambassador to Sarkan, a southeast Asian country where civil war threatens a tense peace. Despite his knowledge, once he's there, MacWhite sees only a dichotomy between the U.S. and Communism. He can't accept that anti-American sentiment might be a longing for self-determination and nationalism. So, he breaks from his friend Deong, a local opposition leader, ignores a foreman's advice about slowing the building of a road, and tries to muscle ahead. What price must the country and his friends pay for him to get some sense? — <[email protected]>

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The Ugly American

• 2 hr 0 mins

Story of an ambassador caught in the political turmoil of an Asian country. Good Marlon Brando performance, and Stewart Stern's script faces issues squarely. Deong: Eiji Okada. Marion: Sandra Church. Homer: Pat Hingle. Grainger: Arthur Hill. Emma: Jocelyn Brando. Kwen Sai: Kukrit Pramoj.

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0:46 The Ugly American

• 1964 - Golden Globe - Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama - nominated
• 1964 - Golden Globe - Best Director - Motion Picture - nominated
• 1964 - Writers Guild Awards - Drama - nominated

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