The Quiet American

One of the libraries I frequent has a liberal check-out policy re DVDs -- one week, no charge. The downside is that they have an even more limited selection than the typical Blockbuster, alas. While browsing the shelves one day, I saw the 1950s version of Graham Greene's The Quiet American and, on a whim, decided to check it out. I checked out Greene's novel, as well, so I could compare/contrast. I had never read a Greene novel before, though I knew the name.

A week later, I rented the Michael Caine/Brendan Fraser version of the novel.

To begin then: I (usually) prefer the printed version of any work of literature. I find that movie versions, no matter how well done, never quite do justice to the author's intent. Particularly in modern cinema, I feel directors "dumb down" their subjects and assume American audiences are just too stupid to understand subtlety. Which is my chief complaint with the Caine/Fraser film.

I enjoyed Greene's novel, and enjoyed both film versions. They're good films and I would recommend them to anyone who was interested. The first version (Movie 1) stars Michael Redgrave and Audie Murphy, and hewed very closely to the novel. The second film (Movie 2) stars Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser, and took more liberties with the novel than Movie 1, except at the end, which remained truer to the novel's. (Short plot outline [skip this if you're already familiar with it]: The story revolves around three main characters -- Thomas Fowler, a Brit journalist, cynical, depressed with his advancing age, and determined to have "no opinion" about the events he's reporting; Alden Pyle, the "quiet American", an idealist who believes he can make Vietnam a model democracy if he can just find that "third force" to oppose both the French and the Communists (sound familiar?); Phuong, a Vietnamese woman who's Fowler's mistress but who falls for Pyle (and vice versa). The setting is 1952 Vietnam, when the French were beginning to extricate themselves from the Vietnam quagmire and the Americans were just getting their toes wet. I'm not going to get any deeper into the plot since it's a "serious" novel and I could write a several blogs about all of its levels -- just wanted to give you an idea of what's going on -- back to my meditation.)

On the whole, I found the novel and Movie 1 more satisfying because they expected the reader/viewer to make inferences and conclusions that were not explicit, unlike Movie 2, which felt the need to spell out everything.

For example: Neither the novel nor Movie 1 ever bluntly reveals just what role Pyle plays at the Economic Aid Mission. It's a near certainty that he's a CIA agent. One of those idealistic, gung-ho, college grads lured into saving the world from the "Red Menace" regardless of the cost. But maybe he isn't (I don't subscribe to that interpretation, but it's arguable). The Caine/Fraser version goes out of its way to make it clear that Pyle is CIA -- he can speak Vietnamese, though he said he couldn't; he claims to have arranged affairs when he and Fowler are driving back from the Holy Mountain so that he could protect him from General The's murderous intentions; and he's able to cross enemy & French lines to visit Fowler when the latter is covering a campaign near Hanoi.

Worse, Pyle's murder is filmed rather than happening off-stage. Why? This is like seeing Caesar's assassination or the murder of the Princes in the Tower or that of Malcolm's wife and children. And we see that the murderer is Fowler's Vietnamese contact. Has our society become so debased and just plain stupid that we have to see the violence, we have to have all things spelled out for us as if we were children? For me, the strength of book and Movie 1 was just that ambiguity that made me think about what was happening and who was doing what.

[This consideration of violence also bothers me inordinately about the scene in The Lord of the Rings when Aragorn lops off the Mouth of Sauron's head. One, the Mouth was a human, not some freakish mutant with a bad dentist; and, two, he was intimidated into backing down at their confrontation and not dealt with violently (like an orc would). It was a cheap appeal to the base nature of the audience, and I can't imagine that Tolkien would have been happy with that change. But my review of Peter Jackson's otherwise quite good Lord of the Rings awaits another day.]

Returning to The Quiet American and one more example: Vigot realizes Fowler has lied to him about Pyle's presence at his flat the night of his (Pyle's) murder when he discovers cement on Pyle's dog's toes and canine footprints in the wet cement in front of Fowler's apartment. Now, since the novel & Movie 1 are not whodunits, this little detail comes up only when Vigot confronts Fowler and plays no significant role. Yet Movie 2's first scene (or practically the first scene) gives us an extreme close up of this paw print, as if it were important. It isn't. It explains why Vigot knew Fowler lied but that's it.

What I got out of Greene's work is this: On the one hand, it's a consideration of love as revealed in the relationships of three fundamentally decent people and how its consequences play out. On the other hand, it's a meditation on the political/social implications of nations holding pretensions to empire and how best to order the world in their image. I think, ultimately, the human story is more important but neither should suffer from a lack of attention; it all depends upon the reader's focus.

Reflecting further, I think there's a third consideration related to Fowler setting up Pyle for murder. Was it because of Phuong or because Pyle was incapable of seeing past his righteous certitude to understand Vietnam and see the human costs of his crusade? Of course, it was both. Without the impetus of his desire for Phuong, Fowler would have had no motivation to teach Pyle such a lethal lesson but was able to justify it because of Pyle's indifference. For me, it's a salutary lesson in the idea that history is made by humans acting in response to particular events and fellow humans, and you should take historians' grand narratives of events with a grain of salt. History is a confused mass of both overt and hidden causes -- it's what makes it so fascinating and it's what makes it necessary to constantly rewrite it.