Southeast Asia and the cold war: Film and fiction in the 1950s

Abstract

Working with English language Cold War films and literature of the 1950s, this chapter focuses on those movies and literary accounts that dealt with Southeast Asia in general, and French Indochina and British Malaya specifically. At the center of these Western representations of the region is a preoccupation with race and ethnicity. From the hill tribes of remote areas to the cities and countryside, Western authors and filmmakers not only documented the people living in these colonial settings but the interactions of Westerners with them. The literature not only includes the more well- known works, such as The Quiet American and The Ugly American, but it also includes Norman Lewis's travel writing and the subsequent novel to emerge from his experiences in French Indochina, A Single Pilgrim. While his travel volume, A Dragon Apparent, is one of Lewis's more famous works, A Single Pilgrim is somewhat obscure. This chapter, however, asserts that both works had an influence on the more renowned later works, including the film adaptations of The Quiet American (1958; directed by Joseph L. Man- kiewicz) and The Ugly American (1963; directed by George Englund). Meanwhile, the section on British Malaya discusses two films that dramatized the Malayan Emergency in the 1950s, The Planter's Wife (1952; directed by Ken Annakin) and Windom's Way (1957; directed by Ronald Neame), the former being a defense of colonialism in Malaya and the latter a more center-right film in terms of ideology. The chapter ends with a discussion of Malayan author Chin Kee Onn's classic works, Ma- rai- ee and The Grand Illusion. The former book about the resistance to Japanese occupation during World War Two is also a story that illustrates the origins of the Communist resistance that would take root during the Emergency. The Grand Illusion, on the other hand, documents the Communist resistance from the perspective of an insurgent within the movement.