Posters for the 1965 movie Operation CIA, starring Burt Reynolds, touted the B-grade American spy thriller as having been “[a]ctually filmed on location” in Vietnam, where the action takes place. But the filmmakers don’t seem to have tried to convince their audience of that, as scholar Adam Knee points out—and for good reason, since the movie was shot in the Thai capital of Bangkok.
“[T]he opening shot of the film is a slow touristic panoramic shot of the Bangkok skyline from near the Chao Phraya River but with the place designation ‘Saigon’ superimposed,” Knee reports. Plus, “dialogue among locals is done in the Thai language, Thai writing can be seen on buildings and on vehicles, and one character’s suitcase even has a clearly visible BKK airport luggage tag.”
Whether low-budget films or all-star productions, some American producers didn’t particularly care where their ostensibly Southeast Asian movies were set, as Knee notices. But why the carelessness in their treatment of locales?
Pragmatism is part of the story, especially as military action in Southeast Asia started to intensify.
The original plan was indeed to film Operation CIA in Saigon, “[b]ut the real-world lack of stability made it so that this production was not so simply or coherently containable,” as non-military personnel were blocked from the area in question, writes Knee. “On another level,” however,
the odd phenomenon of this film’s flagrantly misidentified shooting location is an index not only to the instability of the production context but also to the lack of Western knowledge of the region with which it is about to be intimately and violently bound up.
In Operation CIA, Reynolds plays a secret agent named Mark Andrews, who’s posted undercover to Saigon—now Ho Chi Minh City—to investigate a plot against the US ambassador. Though Knee identifies Reynolds’s character as written “narratively and generically in the same mold” as sexy super-spy James Bond, Andrews is in fact far less successful with the ladies.
Soon after his arrival in Saigon, Andrews mistakes an advertisement for a dubious massage parlor as a clue from a local contact. Instead of finding cloak-and-dagger activity at the establishment, or even engaging in any erotic hijinks, Andrews is promptly stripped and robbed by masseuses there.
Talk about getting caught with your pants down.
It’s not just Burt Reynolds who fails to deliver. Cold War-era Southeast Asia can make fools out of even Hollywood’s toughest leading men, like Marlon Brando, Knee notes. In the prime production The Ugly American, released just two years before Operation CIA, Brando plays MacWhite, an American diplomat sent to win the loyalty of a Southeast Asian nation that looks and sounds like Thailand, has the politics of South Vietnam, and goes by the fictional name “Sarkhan.”
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“[D]espite his cocksureness, MacWhite proves to be in error in his key understandings about the Sarkhan situation,” Knee writes. MacWhite is so oblivious to the local political reality that he misses a communist coup in the making—by any measure, a major setback for American interests.
Knee argues that the inconsistency of the geographical settings goes hand in hand with the how their American protagonists are depicted as inept operators whose heroism is ambiguous.
“[T]his very strangeness is a function of the unease of certain kinds of Cold War ideological negotiation, of the impossibility of achieving certain kinds of desired compromises and outcomes,” he writes. That’s as American actors struggled to project an image that was both assertively independent and “non-interfering and supportive” in both the foreign policy and cultural spheres.
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Knee suggests that films like these contributed to “a kind of Cold War charm offensive” that was intended to make Americans appear less threatening and “potentially a benevolent presence”—at the very point in history that the United States was ramping up military involvement in Vietnam.
“The representations are thus consonant with US foreign relations strategies of containment on the one hand (keeping communist or Soviet forces from gaining too much Asian influence) and integration on the other (fostering US presence and influence around the globe),” he writes.
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