"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..."