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Movie Review: 'The Quiet American'
by Rich Brooks
26 January 2004
"The Quiet American," a Miramax production first released in November 2002, is actually a remake of a 1958 film based on the similarly titled 1956 semi-autobiographical Graham Greene novel. Director Joseph L Mankieiwicz gave the original movie a decidedly pro-American spin, much to the distress of Greene, who had intended his novel to be an indictment of U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. Undoubtedly this enigmatic British Catholic novelist would have been far happier with this latest version, starring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser. Unfortunately, however, the 1958 version is unavailable on either VHS or DVD, so I was unable to compare the two.
"The Quiet American" is set in 1952 Vietnam, a time when the French were fighting a losing battle to maintain their colonial control against the forces of both communist and national-independence movements. Against this backdrop of guerilla war, we have a cynical middle-aged expatriate British journalist Thomas Fowler (Caine) and a seemingly somewhat naïve and idealistic American foreign aid officer Alden Pyle (Fraser) competing for the affections of an admittedly beautiful native girl Phuong. Fowler is married, but estranged from his Catholic wife who remains in London but refuses to give him a divorce. This London Times reporter prefers living an indolent, opium-filled existence in Saigon with his mistress to returning home and assuming a more responsible position with his paper. Fowler, in fact, makes a special trip into dangerous territory to dig up news that will justify his continued stay in Indochina and in the process discovers some very disturbing facts about the ongoing war. Into this picture steps the "quiet American" Pyle, who also falls in love with Phuong and actually wants to marry her and take her back to America.
This scenario should be disturbing to racially conscious Whites, and indeed to me it illustrates a jewish-approved degeneracy in both English and American culture that was evident even in the early 1950s (although American attitudes toward interracial dating and marriage have always been more tolerant of Asian-White relations than of Black-White ones). Contrasted with English and American attitudes, however, the Vietnamese have a much more traditional and healthy racial awareness. A Vietnamese young man, we are told, will never court Phuong as long as she shacks up with this older Englishman; miscegenation was not and is still not tolerated in Asian cultures. However, this film is actually about something more important than one interracial "love triangle," the beginnings of the ill-fated American involvement in Vietnam.
In movies things are not usually as they first seem, and the Pyle character is no exception to this rule. The "quiet American" is in fact a CIA operative secretly supplying weapons to a "third force" in Indochina, attempting to undermine not only the communists but our French allies as well. Pyle, according to most reviews of the Greene novel, was originally a cardboard anti-American caricature, but is fleshed out a little more in this movie with the casting of "good guy" type Fraser in the role. Fraser is indeed believable as an earnest American who is fiercely anti-Communist but at the same time idealistically devoted to (in Mencken's words) "uplifting" the native population. Altruism and anti-Communism has more than once proved to be a deadly combination.
Thomas Fowler proves to be a far more complex and nuanced character, and Caine's performance is of Oscar-nominee caliber. The only other contemporary film actor I can imagine playing this role is Anthony Hopkins, and I'm afraid he would probably ham it up too much. Fowler is cynical, self-indulgent, and seemingly amoral, but he is likeable nonetheless because we know he is also possessed of a keen intelligence. Toward the end of the film there is an event that breaks down Fowler's cynicism and suddenly causes him to finally "take sides" in the Vietnamese political struggle. It is a terrorist bomb explosion in downtown Saigon, and the resultant loss of life touches this correspondent very deeply -- so deeply, in fact, that he is willing in the end to betray a personal friendship for the sake of a political cause. To me, however, this sudden turnabout in attitude is not totally convincing, however good Caine is at making us believe he's had a change of heart. Why would a veteran foreign correspondent, long exposed to all of the cruelties of war, suddenly become so changed by a single bombing incident?
In spite of this last misgiving, and perhaps some inherent weaknesses in the story itself, I found this film to be an honest attempt to come to grips with some hard facts about Vietnam. I asked a Vietnam veteran friend to look at it, and he had no quarrel with the way events were depicted; he liked the movie. I was somewhat ambivalent when I first watched it -- it's somewhat slow moving in the beginning -- but I decided to watch it a second time and came away with a much greater appreciation of it.
As readers of my columns have come to expect, no movie review is complete without some discussion of the jewish element. The producers of "The Quiet American" were Sydney Pollack, William Horberg and Staffan Ahrenberg; need I say more? It was directed by Phillip Noyce, who is originally from Australia but who also has an extremely large schnozzola. But go rent the movie anyway, because I think it is one of the more honest and thought-provoking attempts to come to grips with an important era in American history.
RICH BROOKS
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Visit Mr. Brooks's website at: http://www.whitealert.com.
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