I’m looking for something: American novels or short stories, or films, written/made in the 1960s and 1970s, that directly or indirectly deal with questions of imperialism and anti-imperialism–something like the Heart of Darkness of the times, I suppose. I’m drawing a mental blank and a Google-search nada with this. I’m thinking science fiction will probably have some examples, but there must be other texts. Any help?
Three Days Of The Condor is pretty good, although we don’t find out until near the end that it’s all been about Western plans to take over oil fields in the Middle East.
“It’s simple economics. Today it’s oil, right? In ten or fifteen years, food. Plutonium. Maybe even sooner. Now, what do you think the people are gonna want us to do then? … Not now - then! Ask 'em when they’re running out. Ask 'em when there’s no heat in their homes and they’re cold. Ask 'em when their engines stop. Ask 'em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won’t want us to ask 'em. They’ll just want us to get it for 'em!”
Network kinda sorta deals with that, with Ned Beatty’s monologue near the end to Howard Beale about corporate power eclipsing that of nation-states.
John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up (1972) has an ongoing plot thread in which a US company is supposedly aiding displaced civilians in a small African nation, but in reality the company is sending poisoned food in order to make the situation worse, so that the US has an excuse to intervene.
The novel isn’t specifically about imperialism - it seems to be about everything that bothered people in 1972, and has a few things that seem extraordinarily prescient nowadays amongst all the 70s lingo - but it’s one of those things you have to read, if only once.
The Man Who Would be King was published in 1888, but the film came out in 1975, you could try that.
The Ugly American was a 1958 book but a 1963 movie.
The Quiet American, written about and pubished in the 50’s about the burgeoning American interest in Vietnam it concerns our experience a decade later (no, it’s more like an actual prophecy written in fiction) The recent movie with Brandon Fraser is watchable, the book is short and really good but the film gleans the most important elements as a sort of cliff notes version.
Much obliged so far! Keep 'em coming if you can, it’s for a syllabus that’s still short a novel or film in those decades…it’s much, much easier before 1950 and after 1980.
Taylor Caldwell “Captains and the Kings” - Irish Catholic immigrant starts from doing gunrunning & other errands for the power brokers behind the scenes & advances into wealth & power in 1800s America. He wants to use his position to make his son the first Irish Catholic US President but the power brokers have other plans. The son is a thinly-disguised JFK and the power brokers group, the Committee on Foreign Studies, a thinly-disguised Council on Foreign Relations.
Apocalypse Now came out in 1979 and of course was kinda-sorta based on “Heart of Darkness”.
Soldier Blue, 1970 film that portrays bloody conflict between American Indians and US Cavalry. “Just Like Nam!” was the line actually used on the movie ads.
Little Big Man and MASH* had lots of Vietnam parallels, for that matter.