The Quiet American

I do not usually review movies, but I am forced to review it after watching and seeing that the core message of the book was altered to suite the McCarthyists sentiment of the time. It seems disingenuous that producers would choose to make movie of a book which criticized meddling into other countries affairs in the name of democracy, but will alter the final message to suite American patriotic emotions. At a technical level, the movie is well made, but it is infuriating to see one of the most important iconic books of its time, butchered. It is like making a movie on the book 1984, and in the end showing that Winston was really hallucinating and that Big Brother was really right.

A love triangle played out in early 50s Saigon (prior to independence). A British reporter gets to know a younger American of seemingly innocent intent--the American wants the British reporter's mistress for a wife. There were at least 2 versions of this book made into films this one (1958) and a later one with Michaeal Caine. This movie has a plot twist not in the book that makes it in a way a bit more interesting but not nearly as realistic. Most viewers would probably disagree. I thought at first I had forgotten the story from the book. Greene's best novels are about as good as they get....a lot of the lines in the movie are lifted from the book--which makes for a very good quality script. Recommend...need to see the Caine version....to compare. Have my doubts about it being better as it was made in the modern PC era.

I had two reasons for buying this DVD; my admiration for respectively Michael Redgrave and Joe Mankiewicz. Whilst my Redgrave collection has many gaps I own all but three of the films directed by Mank, The Late George Apley, Escape, and There Was A Crooked Man, which I wouldn't particularly want. As it happened The Quiet American offered a bonus in the shape of Claude Dauphin, which increased its rating for me. Mank himself has referred to it as a bad film but any film with Michael Redgrave can't be totally bad and had Mank been able, as he wanted, to sign Monty Clift for the role of Pyle it would have been several degrees better than it is, Redgrave versus Audie Murphy is not unlike Federer versus John Lloyd. Graham Greene produced his best fiction in the thirties and early forties so that The Quiet American dates from th years he was phoning it in so the fact that he was dissatisfied with the film is neither here nor there. What I take away from the film is yet another brilliant performance from Redgrave plus some tasty cat-and-mousing between him and Dauphin, not bad for a few quid.

Sir Michael Redgrave gave a brilliant performance as the British journalist who befriends a naive American businessman. When his friend is murdered, he recalls the circumstances around his arrival and their relationship. The events take place in Saigon, Vietnam in post World War II and before the catastrophic Vietnam war. The naive American businessman isn't so naive at times. He wants to help the Vietnamese but he doesn't know the game there. The British journalist is married to a woman in England but lives with a beautiful Vietnamese woman, Phuong. I had to read this book for my 20th Century American History Class. The American played by Audie Murphy did a fantastic job against Redgrave. The love triangle for Phuong is believable yet under-stated and tame. There is plenty of intrigue and suspicion. Life before the Vietnam war is uncertain and there are clues to the upcoming conflict. This film was done before the Vietnam War and is telling about international relations especially American's fear of communism ruling the world. Graham Greene's novel is perfectly adapted to the screen here.

The next thing to do after seeing The Quiet American is to see the version done 44 years later. The novel by Graham Greene is set in French Indo-China in 1952 and this version is prophetic. The other one surely has the advantage of a whole lot of hindsight. This film done in 1958 has a lot of foresight. I don't know what to make of Audie Murphy's character, it's never brought out, but he seems to be a CIA man. In the novel he's from the Ivy League, but due to Murphy's speech pattern, his character is from Texas. He's bringing in plastic for industrial purposes purportedly, but we see how the 'plastic' is really used. The political picture of Indo-China in 1952 has the United States already seeing the French won't hold on and they're getting ready to put in their own surrogate in when the French do fall. Murphy is forever talking about a 'third force' who will bring western style democracy. Murphy also becomes romantically involved with Giorgia Moll who is also the mistress of British newspaper correspondent Michael Redgrave. The rivalry between the two prevents either from acting coherently though Redgrave has a much better idea of what's really happening. Interestingly enough the United Kingdom was also fighting to hold on in Malaya the same way that the French were trying to hold on to Indo-China next door. The British were far more successful though. The Quiet American should have been seen by policy makers in Washington through six administrations in America. A lot of valuable lessons could have been learned and a lot of valuable lives might never have been lost.

I loved the Graham Greene novel. I admit I picked it up secretly from my father's library when I was 15. It stayed with me. I knew about the existence of this 1958 version written and directed by Joseph L Mankiewicz but I had never seen it until now, thank you TCM. I had seen the 2002 with a terrific Michael Caine but the film - a more faithful version of Greene's novel according to the critics and it may be true but the 2002 version left me pleased but unmoved while the 1958 version is much more unsettling, in spite of some hard to understand choices by the filmmakers. Audie Murphy plays the quiet American, and he is, very quiet. Good looking a real life American war hero but he is not an actor and here he is sharing the frame with Michael Redgrave. Michael Redgrave! The other oddity is the casting of Italian Actress Giorgia Moll as the Vietnamese girl-in-the-middle. She's lovely but I repeat, she's Italian. No, the power force here is Michael Redgrave, A marvelous, fearless performance and that alone makes The Quiet American an absolute must.

Personally, I thought this movie never really found its direction. One of the advantages of a novel (this is based on one by Graham Greene) is that it can go in many different directions successfully and work very well because the written word allows for a much fuller depiction of what's happening. If you translate the novel into a movie, though, you're dealing with a more limited medium and it's a lot harder to make multiple story lines work. So - what was this? Part Cold War thriller, part murder mystery, part romance, with various other things thrown in, mixed together and ending up as mush. There were parts of this that I enjoyed. Generally, I thought that Peter Redgrave as Fowler (a middle aged, jaded British journalist) and Audie Murphy as "The American" put on pretty decent performances, I appreciated the look (somewhat limited but still present) at Vietnamese culture, and I also appreciated the portrayal of the very early years of the Vietnam War, when it was still the French dealing with a Communist insurgency in what was then an integral part of their Empire. It was an interesting look at that aspect of the Cold War. Not really anti-Communist, as one might expect from the era, but somewhat anti-everything. In that sense, the movie took on Fowler's jaded personality. Starting with the American's murder, the story revolves around the search for the killer and I didn't find that part to be particularly interesting. Unfortunately, that's the bulk of the movie. Woefully underused and under-appreciated, I thought, was Giorgia Moll as Phuong, the young Vietnamese girl who becomes a love interest to both Fowler and the American. One wonders why an Italian born actress was cast as a Vietnamese (not a single Asian actress was around in 1958?) but more disappointing was that she had little to do except sip her ever-present milkshakes. Frankly, I found most of this dreadfully boring. 3/10

The Quiet American is not one of the greatest Greene books, coming after the successes of the Thirties and Forties, but it is a very entertaining read. Joe Mankiewicz made a great adaptation to the screen with superb actors. I will take Michael Redgrave, Giorgia Moll and Claude Dauphin over Michael Caine, Do Thi Hai Yen and Rade Serbedzija in the 2002 version any day, and as for Audie Murphy--sure he's no Hamlet, but his dogged determination and easy Southern charm impress me more than Brendan Fraser in the role of Pyle, that dangerously quiet American. I was pleased by the way the story unfolded, the political themes were well worked out, and the Cao Dai scenes were very good. Don't forget that in 1956 the city scapes of Saigon and the countryside still had not been modernized; you are seeing the real thing. The pairing of Redgrave and Dauphin is as entertaining as that of Bogart and Rains in Casablanca: is there any higher praise?

Graham Greene's novel, "The Quiet American", was about a naive and rather dumb CIA operative whose blunders led to tragedy and death in Vietnam following the withdrawal of the French in the 1950s. It is definitely NOT a story that advises a greater American presence in the country and could even be seen as a huge counterpoint to American foreign policy in the 1960s. So what does Hollywood do? They buy the story and change it completely--and in the process that pretty much make it into a film saying the opposite of Greene in his novel!!! Not surprisingly, the author and many others were ticked and ended up hating the film. So, as a retired history teacher, I could not help but automatically hate the film because of its dishonesty. But that isn't the only problem with the movie...it's also very boring and was filled with Asians who aren't really Asian. All in all, you could certainly do better than this turgid little romance.

Audie Murphy was a good-looking man, and the most legitimate of decorated war heroes. However, to describe his acting style -- in any of his films -- as "wooden," in addition to identifying him by name, is unnecessarily redundant. If we were to place some film samples into a time capsule for future generations, to illustrate an example of acting as "wooden," or, say, with a range of "A-to-B" -- Audie's work would be a perfect example (we could add some from Patrick Swayze, as well). But in spite of this and other performances which are less than stellar, this work provides a glimpse of Vietnam and Southeast Asia, presented a decade before the onset of the Vietnam conflict of the 1960's, and is part of the post-war McCarthy era, where our government took paths which history has shown to be less than wise. With this in mind, and viewing this film a half century after it was made, the sense of history it provides is its most powerful attribute. I also could not help but imagine how a film depicting the events in Iraq and the Mideast during the period of the 1990's into the present circumstances, will appear to viewers when it is seen and commented upon, at a site such as this, say, around 2050 or 2060.