Burn with Brando

Marlon Brando died July 2, 2004. Not long afterward, this letter to the editor by me appeared in a local newspaper, the Marquette, Michigan, Mining Journal. The letter uses a recap of the movie Burn starring Brando to imply that the US ruling class has ulterior motives for wanting to bring their style of democracy to Iraq.

     The great American actor Marlon Brando died recently. I have been a Brando fan since I was a teenager in the 1950s. Over the decades I have enjoyed such movies as VIVA ZAPATA, MISSOURI BREAKS, DON JUAN DE MARCOS, and many others. Of all Brando films, my favorite was released in 1969 with the title QUEIMADA, except titled in Canada THE MERCENARY and titled BURN in the US, where it was released in 1970. It was directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, the Italian movie maker who also directed THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS, about the guerrilla movement in Algiers in the 1950s against the French occupation.
     The story in BURN takes place on a fictional Caribbean island back in the days when Portugal controlled it and had brought slaves from Africa to work the sugar cane plantations. Brando plays William Walker, a British agent pretending to be a tradesman. Walker chooses a young man among the slaves who is a natural, charismatic leader and around him organizes a band of revolutionaries that starts, and eventually wins, an insurrection that frees the island from the Portuguese.
     Then the film shows that Walker is a reactionary who cares not about freedom and democracy for the island's liberated, ex-slave plantation workers but rather about power and profit for the British empire. Backed by the empire's economic power, he cuts a deal with local Creole businessmen that they will govern the country and manage the plantations for British owners, while the African-Caribbean ex-slaves will still be poor and powerless plantation workers -- except now without even the job security of life-long slavery. His job done, Walker goes on to other assignments, other islands.
     A few years later the comprador island government is so corrupt that the plantation workers revolt. Walker is sent back to the island to advise the government on anti-guerrilla strategy. With such brutal methods as burning whole villages and forests, the government crushes the rebellion.
     But the resistance lives on. At the end Walker is shot dead on a city street by a young black man, one of a new generation of freedom fighters.
     Meanwhile the USA is bringing democracy to Iraq.

          Brian Leekley
         Marquette, Michigan