by H. Bruce Franklin
(Originally published in The Nation, February 3, 2003. Copyright © 2003 H. Bruce Franklin; all rights reserved.)
In the new film version of _The Quiet American_, a photographer races into a plaza in downtown Saigon, rather puzzling jaded British reporter Thomas Fowler (Michael Caine). Moments later, a car bomb strews shattered bodies and vehicles around the plaza. We hear another bomb explode nearby. Then we see the supposedly innocent American, Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser), ordering the photographer to focus on dead bodies and the most hideously wounded survivors.
Moviegoers familiar with Graham Greene's novel may wonder why director Philip Noyce is taking such liberties with this crucial scene. Why insert a photographer? Isn't adding a second bomb a bit of cinematic overkill? And where's the novel's dazed, confused Alden Pyle, stumbling with his impenetrable American innocence through the carnage he didn't really intend to cause?
But this scene, like other twists in the film, actually moves deeper into what Greene discovered in the early 1950s about the figure he called the Quiet American--charmingly boyish, impregnably armored in ignorance, righteousness, and good intentions, dedicated to replicating America around the world, preaching democracy and spewing bombs in Vietnam. It also moves _The Quiet American_ into the twenty-first century, with piercing relevance to the "War on Terror."
"Reds' Time Bombs Rip Saigon Center" blared a headline in _The New York Times_ of January 10, 1952. Written by Tillman Durdin, a _Times_ reporter in Saigon working in tight collaboration with the CIA, the story called the bombing "one of the most spectacular and destructive single incidents in the long history of revolutionary terrorism" carried out by "agents here of the Vietminh." A blood-chilling photo of the carnage appeared as "Picture of the Week" in the January 28 _LIFE_ magazine, with a caption that asked people to focus on the most gruesome results of this terrorism by the "Viet Minh Communists": "The bomb blew the legs from under the man in the foreground and left him, bloody and dazed, propped up on the tile sidewalk." The bombing certainly came at a convenient time for the warhawks, including _LIFE_, whose previous week's lead editorial, "Indo-China Is in Danger," was a near panicky call for major U.S. participation in the Vietnam war (which the French were still fighting, with U.S. assistance), because "It's all one war, and our war, whether the front be in Europe, Korea, or Indo-China."
Graham Greene, who was then wintering in Saigon, wondered how _LIFE_ happened to have a photographer on the scene, as he explained in his 1980 memoir, _Ways of Escape_: "The _Life_ photographer at the moment of the explosion was so well placed that he was able to take an astonishing and horrifying photograph which showed the body of a trishaw driver still upright after his legs had been blown off." "This photograph was reproduced in an American propaganda magazine published in Manila over the caption 'The work of Ho Chi Minh,'" Greene continued, despite the fact that General Trinh Minh Thé, a warlord masquerading as Vietnam's savior from colonialism and communism, "had promptly claimed the bomb as his own." "Who," Greene pondered, "had supplied the material" to this "bandit"?
A few months after this bombing and a series of bicycle bombs set off later in January by Thé's agents, Greene began writing his answer in _The Quiet American_. During the Vietnam War and its sequels, the novel became routinely labeled "prophetic." But what Greene was trying to tell us half a century now seems to border on sedition, as our government implements the President's declaration, "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." Indeed, _The Quiet American_ has become so subversive that Miramax tried to deep-six its movie after 9/11 (it was originally set for a 2001 release), until Michael Caine forced a two-week run in December 2002 and a wider opening in early 2003. So now Greene's exposé of the U.S. machinations for imperial war in Southeast Asia in the early 1950s reappears amid the machinations for imperial war in Southwest Asia and the Mideast.
When Greene, a veteran of British intelligence, used his contacts in French security services to investigate the Saigon bombings of January 1952, he discovered a U.S. campaign to create a "Third Force," opposed to both Communism and colonialism and designed to evolve into a U.S.-backed "democracy" in Vietnam. Any resemblance to recent events in Afghanistan and Iraq is hardly coincidental. The hotbed of U.S. Third Force activities was the Economic Aid Mission, headed by someone French commanding General Jean De Lattre called "the most dangerous man in Indochina." Greene himself had been ardently sermonized about the wonders of Third Force "democracy" by a boyish, enthusiastic member of the Economic Aid Mission, a likeable young man who, according to Greene, was the original model for Alden Pyle....
In March 1956, shortly after Mankiewicz bought the film rights to _The Quiet American_, [C.I.A. operative Colonel Edward] Lansdale [who had "arrived on June 1, 1954, in the midst of the Geneva peace negotiations, to launch a systematic campaign of sabotage and terror in the north and to supply a military force for Diem to gain control of Saigon"] wrote to the director from his Saigon operations headquarters and, showing his skills as a former advertising executive, explained how to turn the novel into an assault on Greene and an advertisement for Diem. Although Lansdale acknowledged that Trinh Minh Thé had done the bombing and claimed credit for it in a radio broadcast, he assured Mankiewicz that no "more than one or two Vietnamese now alive know the real truth of the matter, and they certainly aren't going to tell it to anyone," so he should "just go ahead and let it be finally revealed that the Communists did it after all, even to faking the radio broadcast."
Mankiewicz cast Audie Murphy, the most decorated U.S. soldier of World War II, as "The American" (he has no other name in the film), got one of Diem's henchmen to organize the on-location shooting, dedicated the film to Diem, and arranged for the first screenings to be benefits for one of Diem's main sponsors, the International Rescue Committee. "The American" is completely innocent and thoroughly heroic. In the car-bomb scene, it is not he but Fowler (Michael Redgrave) who is unmasked. The American arrives with medical equipment in a "United States Christian Mission" truck (the movie makes Murphy closely resemble Tom Dooley) to care for the wounded. When Fowler, who has been duped by the Communists, stands amid the carnage hysterically accusing him of involvement in the bombing, The American, fuming with righteous indignation, shouts, "For once in your life, why don't you just shut up and help somebody?"
Later, The American tries one last time to convince Fowler of the righteous destiny of the democratic Third Force. "I met a very prominent Vietnamese living in exile in New Jersey," he earnestly explains. "If all goes well, if Vietnam becomes an independent republic, this man will be its leader." This was, of course, the man actually reigning in Saigon in 1958, five years before another covert U.S. plot arranged his murder.
The terrorist bombs, according to the 1958 movie, have been set off by the Communists so that they can trick Fowler into helping them murder both the American and his vision of Third Force democracy. "It was the idea that had to be murdered," French police inspector Vigot tells Fowler. "To help assassinate the idea," Vigot explains, the Communists needed someone "gifted in the use of words," someone who would substitute "a work of fiction, an entertainment" for reality. As Fowler realizes how he has been used by the insidious Communists, he is reduced to a writhing, loathsome, and self-loathing stand-in for Graham Greene.
But now the tables are turned once more by the current film, which transforms that Lansdale-Mankiewicz fiction into a subtext, framing many scenes with similar composition while exposing the earlier film as a continuation of the 1952 U.S. terrorist conspiracy. Ironically, delaying the wide release of _The Quiet American_ has added deeper layers of meaning, because in 2003 we understand even more about how terrorism can be used as a pretext for war, and who uses it.
[The full article is available at <http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~hbf/QUIETAM.htm>.] -- Yoshie
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