Hollywood representations of Burma paint the country as an exotic, cruel land that serves as a backdrop for daring occidental adventurers and patriots.

The earliest Hollywood imaginings of Burma were romantic melodramas about white women in jeopardy, using the Southeast Asian landscape as an exotic backdrop. These and subsequent films about Burma have relegated Burmese characters to the sidelines.

A lurid, silent thriller about prostitution and murder, Road to Mandalay (1926), set the tone. Eight years later saw the release of Mandalay, in which the Sacramento Delta in California plays the part of the Irrawaddy River. It is a sordid tale of revenge, murder, a Rangoon nightclub hostess, and a drunken doctor on his way to a "black fever" outbreak. The Girl from Mandalay (1936) featured another nightclub entertainer, another epidemic, and a tiger attack.

Moon Over Burma (1940) is Dorothy Lamour’s turn as the nightclub chanteuse, with Burma depicted as a jungle paradise, the usual setting for her popular "sarong movies"—romances in which she sang, swathed in form-fitting batik. The central character in these early pictures was always the victimized, yet plucky, Western—or part-Asian—woman adrift in the mysterious Orient.

In Like Flynn

Throughout the decade, World War II themes dominated Burma and Hollywood. A cluster of Burma Road movies appeared—Burma Convoy (1941), Bombs Over Burma (1942) and A Yank on the Burma Road (1942)—but they were set mostly on the China-end of the 1,000-mile long Burma Road, which once linked China to India. The only Hollywood Burma comedy, Rookies in Burma (1943), combines the thirties and forties themes as a pair of comical soldiers who break out of a Japanese prison camp and hook up with a pair of glamorous nightclub entertainers for an escape across Burma.

Burma as a place from which to escape is the main theme of subsequent Hollywood Burma movies, from the forties and in recent times alike. Directed by Raoul Walsh, Objective Burma (1945) opens with documentary footage, although the rest of the film looks like a California landscape bedecked with extra tropical plants. An American platoon, led by a low-key Errol Flynn, penetrates the "Jap-infested jungle" on an extended mission. Black-and-white cinematography by James Wong Howe and a haunting musical score establish an unrelenting atmosphere of peril.

Flynn’s troops do not encounter any local people until meeting a few Urdu-speaking longyi-wearing men at the outskirts of an otherwise Japanese-occupied village. The village has stone Buddha and chinthe (mythical lion) statues, a fantastic gingerbread pagoda, and a temple bell. These serene Burmese elements contrast with the Japanese atrocities against American soldiers that have taken place in the village.

Anna and the Pilot

The Purple Plain (1954), based on a novel by H E Bates, with a script by Eric Ambler, was filmed in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. Forrester, a Canadian pilot played by Gregory Peck, loses his wife in the bombing of London, then crashes his plane in the dry zone of Burma. Barely surviving a harrowing jungle trek, he finds his way to a Burmese village, where he meets the luminous Anna, played by Win Min Than.

The Purple Plain was the only Western movie about Burma to bother casting actual Burmese actors, until 1995. Win Min Than’s Anna revives Forrester’s mind and soul. It is a vivid, memorable performance. Novelist Paul West has written that the "slender, winsome, deeply spiritual" Anna, with her crisp British accent, "animates the movie" and "summons up all the Asian heroines" of literature. Although Anna ultimately serves as the agent of the Western male’s salvation, when Win Min Than is on screen the movie is about her. This focus on a Burmese person makes Purple Plain unique.

Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, Escape to Burma (1955) is a bit of nonsense apparently meant for the Saturday matinee crowd. Although the story refers to the murder of an ethnic Shan saohpa’s (local chieftain) son by an American miner, and Barbara Stanwyck plays a tough teak wallah—instead of a nightclub dancer—the whole effect is ludicrous. Caucasians in Indian raja drag play the Shans, the elephants are very obviously on loan from a circus along with the orangutan and the chimpanzee, and the studio jungle set is straight out of a florist’s shop. Not even references to tigers, rubies, nats (animist spirits) and dacoits bring this any closer to 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.

Perhaps future Hollywood movies will be set in a new Burma in which a Nau Taung, Anna, or Aung Ko is the hero, foreigners are supporting characters, the rivers are no longer escape routes, and the forests are reclaimed from nightmares.

Edith Mirante is the author of Burmese Looking Glass and Down the Rat Hole.