peteg's blog - noise - movies - 2012 10 08 TheQuietAmerican

The Quiet American (1958)

Mon, Oct 08, 2012./noise/movies | Link

Joseph L. Mankiewicz (All About Eve) went to Saigon to film this early adaptation (bastardisation) of Graham Greene's incisive novel. Here Phuong is played by the Italian Giorgia Moll, Fowler by Michael Redgrave and the American by Audie Murphy, the most decorated U.S. soldier of World War II. I enjoyed the shots of the old city and would have preferred to see even more of it; too much of this dialogue-heavy film is set indoors. At some point it loses the poignancy of the old colonials warning off the neocolonials from the quagmire that Vietnam already was.