The Quiet American
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The Quiet American (ISBN 0099478390) is a novel written by Graham Greene in 1955. It has been adapted into two films.
The novel takes place in Saigon in the early 1950s during the end of the First Indochina War. It portrays two concurrent conflicts: a romantic triangle between the veteran British journalist Thomas Fowler, the young American Alden Pyle, and Fowler's Vietnamese girlfriend Phuong; and the political turmoil and growing American involvement that led to the Vietnam War. Fowler, who narrates the story, is involved in the war only as an observer; his experiences are partly based on Greene's own years in Vietnam. Pyle is more directly involved on a number of levels, and Greene draws parallels between Pyle's conduct and America's overall policies in Vietnam.
The turning point of the story involves an effort by the U.S. to build up a corrupt militia leader, General Thé—based on the actual Trinh Minh The—as a "Third Force" against the Viet Minh. A series of terrorist bombings in Saigon, blamed on the Communists, are used to justify Thé's takeover of the city; similar nonfictional events took place in 1952 while Greene was in Saigon. Greene believed (and it was soon confirmed) that the bombings were in fact engineered by Thé as a pretext, with the cooperation of American advisors. In the novel, Fowler's discovery of this thinly concealed plot leads him to his one political act, though his methods and motives are as questionable as Pyle's.
The first film adaptation, released in 1958, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and starring Audie Murphy and Michael Redgrave, was critically well received. However, the adaptation—written by Mankiewicz, with uncredited input from CIA officer Edward Lansdale, who was often said to be the actual inspiration for Pyle—departed entirely from Greene's premise at the end, blaming the Communists for the Saigon bombings and thus inverting the novel's political message; the film was dedicated to Ngo Dinh Diem, the U.S.-backed president of South Vietnam who took office shortly after the novel's publication. Greene disavowed the film as "propaganda".
The second adaptation, released in 2002, directed by Phillip Noyce and starring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser, was much more faithful to the novel, updating the ending only slightly to include a montage of images from the subsequent decades of war in Vietnam. The producer's concerns about criticizing U.S. foreign policy in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks delayed the film's release by more than a year.
External links
- The Quiet American (2002 version) at IMDB (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0258068/)
- The Quiet American (1958 version) at IMDB (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052106/)
- Yahoo! Movies page of Quiet American (http://movies.yahoo.com/shop?d=hv&cf=info&id=1808405549&intl=us)
- Official website of Quiet American movie (http://www.miramax.com/quietamerican/)
- "By the Bombs' Early Light" (http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~hbf/QUIETAM.htm) - essay by H. Bruce Franklin on the historical context of the novel and the 2002 film