Escapist Entertainment: Hollywood Movies of Burma

Jungle Hell

Burma’s indigenous people are important characters in Never So Few, (1959). The title refers to the "less than a thousand Kachin warriors" alongside the Allies taking back Japanese-occupied northern Burma. Never So Few boasts a star-studded "Rat Pack" cast that includes Frank Sinatra, Peter Lawford, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, and Gina Lollobridgida. The Korean-American actor Philip Ahn ably plays a Kachin officer named Nau Taung, and at last, there are plenty of Asian extras.

With a combination of Ceylon locations and bogus jungle sets, Never So Few is a rather clich้ and unconvincing mess. But Sinatra, with a peacock feather in his Gurkha hat, as the American "Duwa" (leader), makes some very nice Hollywood liberal pleas for full respect for the Kachins. They in turn show their appreciation in an authentic-looking silver sword ceremony. Nau Taung is the loyal and sacrificial Asian sidekick, another Anna, who lights up the screen but only in support of the Western hero.

The last of the WWII Burma pictures was macho director Sam Fuller’s Merrill’s Marauders (1962). Based on Charlton Ogburn’s history of the American guerrilla force, Marauders, like Objective Burma, follows a small group of infantrymen, here commanded by Jeff Chandler’s Brig-Gen Frank Merrill. Chandler, who died soon after the filming, gives a nuanced performance as the doomed General. Marauders begins with newsreel footage of "the cruelest jungle on earth" which establishes the usual Burma-as-hell theme. Filmed in the Philippine highlands for a reasonably close approximation of northern Burma, the movie shows the relentless slaughter of Japanese and American soldiers, with those who do not fall in battle succumbing to fatigue, madness, and disease.

After meeting only Japanese mayhem in the hills and along the rivers, the unit fights its way into a village where some children and women appear. These indigenous civilians are victims of the war, but offer compassion to the exhausted soldiers. Without romantic implication, the women, wrapped in plain sarongs, give cooked rice to the exhausted Marauders. As one grandmotherly type feeds spoonfuls of rice to a battle-hardened, bearded infantryman, he begins to weep. It is one of the most affecting moments in any of these films, and truly expresses the loving kindness one encounters in Burma despite the most horrific circumstances. Burma in wartime is hell on earth but Burma also provides glimpses of an earthly heaven.

Monks and Soldiers

It took until 1995 for another Western movie to be set in Burma. Finally, it was a motion picture about Burma itself, in particular the traumatic events of 1988. Still, Beyond Rangoon, directed by Ireland’s John Boorman, yet again features a Western protagonist, Dr Laura Bowman (an anti-charismatic performance by Patricia Arquette) As usual, Burma is a Third World tropical hellhole—this time infested by its own soldiers—to be fled. Once again, a charming and trustworthy local, Aung Ko (played by himself) guides the Westerner, in both the navigational and spiritual senses. Like Forrester in The Purple Plain, Dr Bowman is numbed by shock over the death of a spouse and finds renewal in the midst of chaotic danger.

Boorman took extraordinary care to get Burma right by recreating it in Malaysia. At last, many of the Burmese characters are played by Burmese. The look of the film is based on rare 1988 videos, photographs, and the recollections of exiles. From the shophouses of Rangoon to the thanaka powder on the extras’ faces, there is an almost tangible sense of Burma in this movie. The political setting is handled with large doses of expository dialogue: "In Burma, everything is illegal." "Burma is a land of monks and soldiers." "Burma will be saved when every student, every professor, and every mother, faces the guns like [opposition leader] Aung San Suu Kyi." This is all interspersed with scenes of wrenching violence, the bravery of students, and a stunning vignette of Suu Kyi.

Despite the conventions of its Western heroine, Burmese guide, and escape plotline, Beyond Rangoon is an educational film wrapped in an adventure movie. One of the expository comments, in Dr Bowman’s flat California voice, is about the 1988 uprising: "For most of the world it just didn’t happen." This movie was obviously devised to confront and change that ignorance.