Pithlord,
I dont think you watched Rambo 3. may be you should. especially the ending where Sly Stallone waves goodbye to the mujahideen who helped him kill all the evil commies.

I note that there have been reasonably successful movies made with Native Americans (or whatever the preferred collective noun here at AmCon is for people descended from people resident in the Americas pre-1492) as protagonists and the US (soldiers and civilians) as primarily antagonists.

Maybe. As most of the mujahideen were Pashtun, even if they received a lot of Saudi and Pakistani aid, I think there was more flexibility in portraying them as freedom fighters of a specifically anticommunist type. Even so, they are much more easily made into heroes because they fought for us. They fit the role of Arabs in the Lawrence story: the noble, oppressed people whom the benevolent Western ally befriends and respects in order to defeat a common foe. Possibly a better question: would anyone ever be able to sell a biopic of Al-Afghani? I somehow doubt it.

Perhaps a better, less loaded question: could you make a film about Aguinaldo and his role in the Filipino War (or just a film about the Filipino War) that would not be automatically categorized as anti-American? He fits the underdog role Conrad mentioned, but he was an underdog against our forces.

The problem with Che’s story is that once he came into power in Cuba under Castro, he became a merciless totalitarian killer and leader of the government terror squads. Not exactly in keeping with his romantic underdog role. So most sympathetic accounts tend to leave those elements of his story out. Still, the result in Cuba and elsewhere is not terribly inspiring. Hard to make a sympathetic movie about Robespierre or Lenin, even if he did fight against the monarchy and in favor of the peasants, due to that massive dependence on state terror.

Obviously with Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR, the sympathetic part of their story is that they allegedly fought for the common man, or the underclass, for freedom and demoncracy, and against evil, slavery, monarchism, etc. The amount of death that resulted was part of the tragic price paid to ensure these goals were achieved. And they refrained from using state terror to achieve their goals, or at least that’s how the story is told.

It’s harder to tell that kind of story to a western audience about Arafat or even Ataturk. It’s also hard to keep it interesting without a western proxy like Lawrence to identify with. Even in that movie, the Arabs come off as interesting, but not terribly sympathetic.