On Film and in Print, 'The Quiet American' Still Fascinates

AN FRANCISCO, Jan. 29 — On the frontispiece of "The Quiet American," Graham Greene quotes another well-traveled skeptic, Lord Byron: "This is the patent age of new inventions/ For killing bodies, and for saving souls,/ All propagated with the best intentions."

In novels, screenplays and short stories, Greene chronicled the end of empire. Scorning those who stood in history's way, he did not spare heroes, patriots or the naïve. "God save us always from the innocent and the good," Fowler, the jaded correspondent who narrates "The Quiet American," says to the French inspector, Vigot. After critics called Greene anti-American, Hollywood distorted "The Quiet American" in 1958 with a heroically happy ending. After the Sept. 11 attacks, Miramax postponed the second film version until Sir Michael Caine, who portrays Fowler, became persuasively unquiet. (It opened last November.)

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The book endures, having served as a journalistic guidebook, a prophecy and even a tourist icon. Banned in Vietnam in the 1950's, "The Quiet American " is now sold at kiosks in Ho Chi Minh City as a symbol of local color, like "Moby Dick" on Nantucket or "Cannery Row" in Monterey. The book heavily influenced correspondents who covered the American war in the 1960's. "Many passages some of us can quote to this day," said David Halberstam, who received a Pulitzer Prize in international reporting while a correspondent for The New York Times in 1964. "It was our bible."

Fowler, following a besieged French patrol, outlines a modus operandi for intrepid reporters: "No journalists were allowed, no cables could be sent, for the papers must carry only victories. The authorities would have stopped me in Hanoi if they had known of my purpose, but the farther you get from headquarters, the looser becomes the control, until, when you come within range of the enemy's fire, you are a welcome guest."

By the 1960's, the book had become "the equivalent of what Napoleon suggested: a marshal's baton in every corporal's knapsack," recalls David Greenway, who covered the Vietnam War for Time and The Washington Post. "Every reporter had one. Many carried 'The Quiet American' and 'Scoop' by Evelyn Waugh."

The British press bracketed Greene and Waugh as "Catholic novelists" because both wrote morality-play novels, but while Waugh celebrated military exploits, Greene, who served in British intelligence during World War II, did not. In 1956, American critics failed to salute "The Quiet American" when it was published in the United States.

"His caricatures of American types are often as crude and trite as those of Jean-Paul Sartre," wrote Robert Gorham Davis in The New York Times. In The New Yorker, A. J. Liebling called the book a "nasty little plastic bomb."

In 1952, the year Greene writes about, some 300 Americans were in Vietnam. Fowler mocks policies that would later send hundreds of thousands of G.I.'s into the jungles and protesters onto American streets. "If Indochina goes ——" argues the American, an undercover government agent named Alden Pyle.

Fowler interrupts him: "I know that record. Siam goes. Malaya goes. Indonesia goes. What does `go' mean? If I believed in your God and another life, I'd bet my future harp against your golden crown that in 500 years there may be no New York or London, but they'll be growing paddy in these fields, they'll be carrying their produce to market on long poles, wearing their pointed hats."

Fowler and Pyle, the quiet American of the title, compete for the attentions of Phuong, a young Vietnamese woman. Love and war in an exotic locale is a cinematic staple, but in Greene's novels and screenplays the dominant triangle is God, guilt and Greene. Like "Casablanca" (1942) in World War II, "The Third Man" (1949), written by Greene, blends love and danger, but is set in cold war Vienna. Even an early Indochina movie, "Red Dust" (1932), finds Clark Gable running a rubber plantation while in a romantic triangle with Mary Astor and Jean Harlow.

Today, some filmgoers would argue that Michael Caine was born for the role of Fowler; others that he was born 20 years too soon. The power of his performance is in his face, a road map of the paths to glory he followed in earlier roles: his stand as Lieutenant Bromhead with Stanley Baker in "Zulu" (1962), and, as Peachy Carnehan, his trek to Kafiristan with Sean Connery's Danny Dravot in "The Man Who Would Be King" (1975). With no more dominion over palm and pine, Sir Michael's performance in this film is ripe with an antiheroic vulnerability imposed by age and dissolution, often punctuated with Lear-like rage. As Phuong tells Fowler, he is "not so old, not so fragile." Brendan Fraser's Pyle is a study in cagy befuddlement. In one scene, he wears a Red Sox cap, a symbol of lethal innocence that had not occurred to Greene.

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