The Quiet American: A Cinematic Masterpiece

plainoldme

I started a thread on "The Quiet American" Feb. 19 and it generated only 7 responses. I think very few movie-goers have seen it or possibly there are few opportunities to see it. Without going through the whole background,
I'm going to try to find out. The movie and Caine's performance have gotten rave reviews. Why wouldn't the producers -Miramax- want to make money?

Billy -- I will have to look for your original thread. Don't you find that more serious movies often have the smallest audiences? As for the movie having been pulled because of 9/11...the knowledge of the pulling seemed to have hurt rather than helped the movie.

I enjoyed the film immensely. There was far more to it than I expected, and the acting was wonderful. And a timely film, considering what we as a nation seem about to embark on...

The film was far, far below the original novel in terms of characterization and depth. Brendan Fraser had no idea what he was doing and so the whole political point of the movie was muffled or lost. Caine has been much better in other roles, notably EDUCATING RITA, and on top of that he is too old to play the character as Greene conceived him. The script made a hash out of the plot and the politics.

While the film didn't strike me as overly subtle, perhaps the political dimension was too much so for some viewers. Seemed to me it struck the perfect balance re explication, and the viewer had to do some of the work in extracting the film's meaning.

As is true for all the best films and books...

I defy anyone who did not already know that the French were fighting a losing battle against Ho Chi Minh with American assistance to get that simple political point from the movie. It was a mess on every score, but most obviously on the brute facts of what was happening in Vietnam in 1953. Graham Greene must be spinning in his grave.

I defy anyone who did not already know that the French were fighting a losing battle against Ho Chi Minh with American assistance to get that simple political point from the movie

Gee, the movie did a fine job of conveying that fact.

I did not read the book. I have put myself on the waiting list to read the public library's copy. I am not certain that I will be able to read it as I never read mysteries, spy thrillers, or related genres. If the book is grounded in political philosophy, it may go down well.

Many people are divided on actors and their abilities. Mention Tom Hanks and half the people think him brilliant (certainly was in Finding Pvt Ryan and Catch ME if you Can) while others think him a personality, a star and not an actor. I do not find Brendon Frasier attractive although that goes against the general grain and I don't think I have seen his other movies but I did find him perfect -- and brilliant -- here.

This was a movie made with a lot of the obvious movie symbolism. Did you see The French Lt's Woman? I laughed out loud at the beginning of Merle Streep's historic character's last encounter with Jeremy Irons' character: before seeing him, she threw off her shawl, symbolically exposing her breasts. In every other scene between those two, Streep clutched her shawl over her body! It was funny! The man I was with missed that completely.

Several years later, with a different man at the Bruce Willis movie -- the I see dead people pic -- my poor date was shocked at the ending. I said, "Didn't you know Willis was dead?" The table scene gave it away...when Willis and the mom were sitting "together," waiting for the boy to come home.

The Quiet American was just full of things like that. As I said before, Frasier was cast because he was taller and broader than Caine but he aquitted himself well.

I saw The Quiet American this week and I was impressed.

In particular what I very much enjoyed was the depiction of Hanoi in 1951. It seems to me that the film caught that feeling very well, and the interiors were fabulous, very evocative. The overall atmosphere of over-ripeness, of corruption, of instability, was conveyed in a masterly way.

I do not agree that Michael Caine was too old for the part- surely that was part of the drama, the old European, comfortable and set in his ways and unwilling to change, coupled with the beautiful young Vietnamese girl.
I felt uncomfortable when I saw them together, and surely that was deliberate on the part of the director.

This made the film's metaphor, already referred to, all the more marked.

A remarkable film, and all the more so because no-one came out looking good at the end. No heroes, and a medley of villany.

McT

I had an advantage in having reading the book less than ten years ago and Graham Greene is without a doubt one of the finest writers of the last century. It's a political drama with none of the devices used in spy thrillers -- it's about authentic people, their character and the effects of a rush of circumstances on their minds and bodies. That it was written this time for the screen with a more up-to-date viewpoint did not damage the basic premises of the novel. I thought the older film did a lot more to alter the complexion of the book and it was even murkier as to what was going on (I read the book long after I saw that film). Like all adaptations of great novels, there's going to be some who don't buy the cinematic version. I tried to not think of the book and enjoyed the film immensely. I suppose if I read the book again, it would diminish the stature of the film and I do plan on putting it on my re-read list soon as well as some other Greene.

Interesting postings...you have peaked my curiousity.

I'm glad to hear Greene's book, "The Quiet American," does not use the devices of a thriller. Am looking forward to reading it.

Glad to be reading again: after 9/11, I found reading impossible for quite some time.

I just read the novel again and found scene after great scene that were left out of the movie, to the detriment of the movie...I have no idea why the filmmakers thought they could tell this story better than Graham Greene himself did. But much of the drama of the love triangle is lost because of the adaptation, as is much of the political intrigue.

You write that much is lost in the adaptation. I recently reread The Forsyte Saga after having enjoyed what I consider the very good adaptation on television.

I first read Galsworthy when I was 14...too young! All I remembered from The Saga was Fleur, so for years, I thought the book over-rated.
The excellence of the teleplay convinced me to revisit the novel.

There were significant differences. I don't know whether you saw the teleplay or ever read the book, but like Greene's book, there is a love triangle -- actually, it is a love parallelogram, but we'll ignore that for the present -- involving an architect named Bosinney, a young woman named June and her aunt by marriage named Irene.

Irene is married to a man she doesn't love and falls into an affair with Bosinney, hired by her husband to build a special house for them in hope of making Irene happy. Irene had stopped having sex with her husband before meeting and falling in love with Bosinney. Irene's husband raped her one night and, in her upset, she went to Bosinney, who "lost his mind" in rage and went stalking her husband. In doing so, he was lost in a pea soup London fog, run over by a carriage and killed.

Now, in the novel, a cousin of Irene's husband happens to see the distraught Bosinney -- who is being sued by the husband over the house, not the wife -- and follows him. Galsworthy has this cousin hear Bosinney mutter, so the cousin learns the story. The next day, following Bosinney's death, is the trial. Bosinney, of course, doesn't appear. June, his estranged fiancee, goes to his rooms, part dwelling and part office and finds them locked. Galsworthy gives us her inner monologue: should she simply wait? leave? get the key from the concierge? look for a hidden key? She elects to look for a hidden key which she finds and lets herself in. As she looks about the rooms, she sees important things are missing and she begins to realize how much trouble he is in. Irene then enters.

Good on the page, except is it realistic that if a distraught man is seen by someone who knows him, follows him, hears his muttering, would he turn to acknowledge his shadow? Not realistic although June's process of discovery is.

In the teleplay, Irene goes to Bosinney, who takes off after her husband, leaving his door open in his haste to follow the husband to the husband's club where Bosinney creates a scene. The trial happens. June goes to Bosinney's rooms where she sees the door open and the camera pans to June's face. The actress uses her talent to communicate with us what Galsworthy wrote. June as portrayed by the actress enters Bosinney's rooms where she is shortly joined by Irene. They have the conversation Galsworthy wrote. June then goes to the club in search of Bosinney where she meets another of her husband's cousins who tells her of the events of the night before.

Now, these two versions are not the same but had this part of the story been filmed as Galsworthy wrote it, it would have been a boring and lugubrious movie, using corny voice overs to convey what June was thinking. The following of Bosinney by the cousin would have been ludicrous.

All this is to suggest that some changes are necessary to account for changes in media.

On the other hand, I saw the movie, The Name of the Rose," and loved it. Then read the book which I enjoyed even more. I rewatched the movie and thought very little of it.

Sometimes changes help and sometimes changes hurt.

The changes in THE QUIET AMERICAN all, uniformly, hurt. They blunted the sharp edge of Greene's narrative. Why the screenwriters and directors thought they could improve on his selection of scenes and incidents is beyond me. Of course, they were stuck with the appallingly bad Brendan Fraser in the title role.

Larry, is it not the case that, whichever novel a screenwriter or a filmmaker choose to film, much of it has to be left out? It is not possible to give a complete and unabridged account of a novel in a film lasting less than 90 mins or so.
Or even any film. The two art forms are different. Isn't that so?

McTag -- Couldn't agree more than your statement that films and novels are two different art forms.

The first movie I ever saw twice in first run was Orlando, based on the Virginia Woolf novel of the same name. As I was leaving after thoroughly enjoying myself post prime viewing, an idiot -- the sort of loudmouth pseudo intellectual one sometimes finds in Cambridge, MA but often finds with greater frequency in less cerebrally oriented cities -- was YELLING ON THE TOP OF HIS VOICE TO HIS FEMALE COMPANION (from their behavior, I am certain she was not a date...and from his, I would reasonably guess he never had a date), "They replaced the flowing prose of Virginia Woolf with a glace from Tilda Swinton." I wanted to run up to him and say, "Of course, a book is narrative and a movie is visual," bet preferred to run as fast as one can away from him.

There are movies that improve upon books -- in fact, perhaps we should have a thread on that subject. I have to jog my memory to think of the best example...it was based on a Fay Weldon novel (which was booring and inept) and starred Meryl Streep and Roseanne.

One of the things filmakers almost always do to make the details of a novel fit into a standard movie length is to eliminate characters. Even the maxi-miniseries based on Galsworthy eliminated characters.

A movie is a narrative too. It is not visual like a painting, it tells a story based on a dramatic sequence of events. Movies and novels are much more similar than movies and paintings are or movies and frescoes are. In any event, I would stronly recommend that all of you who liked the movie read the book of THE QUIET AMERICAN so you will see what Graham Greene really had in mind. It is a short novel (188 pages in the Penguin edition) and well worth the trouble of buying and reading.

A movie is a narrative but not the same sort of narrative a novel is.

I signed up to read The Quiet American when it sorts through the library. Frankly, because I might not enjoy the book, I wouldn't buy it.

Obviously a movie and a novel are not the same sort of narrative. But they have a great deal in common, which is why so many movies are adapted from novels. How many movies are adapted from sonnets or frescoes or portraits?