The Quiet American ** (1958, Audie Murphy, Michael Redgrave, Giorgia Moll, Claude Dauphin) – Classic Movie Review 5337

Writer-producer-director Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1958 movie uses half of Graham Greene’s distinguished bestselling novel, and then turns it into a love triangle story and murder-thriller, with lots of dialogue, pro-American stance and a Communist-bashing ending tailored to the era. Regrettably, but perhaps inevitably, Mankiewicz turns Greene’s strongly held and delivered anti-war message and attack on American foreign intervention into one of pro-American anti-communist advocacy.

It is the first time a feature film was shot in Vietnam and shooting was expectedly difficult.

In the re-written screen story, a young naive American aid worker economist (Audie Murphy) comes to Saigon in 1952 Vietnam, meets a hard-bitten, cynical older English reporter called Thomas Fowler (Michael Redgrave), who is living with a beautiful young Indo-Chinese woman named Phuong (Italian actress Giorgia Moll), and then falls for her himself.

Redgrave’s intense and compelling performance brings the film’s main touch of distinction and its nearest shade of Greene, with Redgrave expectedly overshadowing Murphy’s acting. Murphy said: ‘My part is one of the greatest I’ve ever had.’

Shot in black and white by Robert Krasker, it is filmed, with some distinction and style and with much flavour and atmosphere, in Indo-China and at Rome’s Cinecittà studios. It is a good enough film, but somehow a bit disappointing and a slight missed opportunity.

Also in the cast are Claude Dauphin as Inspector Vigot, Kerima, Bruce Cabot, Fred Sadoff, Richard Loo, Peter Trent, Clinton Anderson, Yoko Tani, Sonia Moser and Georges Brehat.

Montgomery Clift and Laurence Olivier were originally cast, but Clift withdrew for health reasons and Olivier then left the film.

Angry that his anti-war message was excised, one-time Indochina war correspondent Greene attacked the movie as a ‘propaganda film for America’ and renounced it. Certainly Mankiewicz dilutes the impact of Greene’s story by focusing on its love triangle plot more than the politics of the war and of course rejecting Greene’s anti-American involvement stance. It is these fatal compromises that Mankiewicz makes that really account for the disappointment the film brings.

It is remade as The Quiet American by Phillip Noyce in 2002 with Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5337

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