Word: englishman
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...make any comment," said Floyd. "But don't you agree," asked Fight Fan Braddock, "that boxing for every physically fit boy gives him balance, judgment and sportsmanship?" Replied Patterson, after deep thought: "Definitely." Viewing the Thames, Visitor Patterson delivered a judgment on the great grey river that any Englishman would accept: "Mighty cold...
...Greene's instinct for weaving the fictional web, for making life look marvelously complex and always come out even. But life is sometimes very odd indeed, and the story sometimes invites a suspicion that Greene has rigged his game -a suspicion certified by the ease with which the Englishman wins it, and by the oafishness with which the American loses. It is a cheap debating trick, and it cheapens the picture as it did the book. But the picture, in the last reel, suffers at the hands of Scriptwriter-Director Joseph Mankiewicz an even more drastic devaluation...
...Federation of Indo-China in 1952. "With his gangly legs and his crew cut and his wide campus gaze he seemed incapable of harm." But he is an idealist. "He was determined to do good, to people, to countries, to the whole world." His naivete horrifies Greene's Englishman, a middle-aged newsman named Fowler (Michael Redgrave), whose pipedreams are provided by opium, and whose pipe is prepared by his pretty little Vietnamese mistress, Phuong. (Phuong is in the picture, but the opium is not.) Aside from Phuong (Giorgia Moll), the Englishman's principal passion is his uninvolvement...
...first of all, in Vietnamese politics, by supporting (with arms as well as money) a general through whom he hopes to create a "Third Force" between the local right and left. And he gets mixed up with Phuong. The American is terribly fair about the girl. He tells the Englishman, even before he tells Phuong, that he has fallen in love with her. He intends, he says, to marry her and take her back to "the folks in Texas," and he belligerently allows to Fowler (whose wife, back in England, will not give him a divorce) that "a woman...
Thus with his good intentions the American has paved the road to hell for the Englishman. And soon he seems well on the way to killing the whole country with kindness. But before that can happen, the Englishman contrives, through the agency of some serviceable Communists, to kill the American. The book ended there, with the Englishman feeling very little pain. But the picture goes on, in a foolishly obvious attempt to sugar the pill so that U.S. moviegoers will swallow it, to take it all back about the American. It turns out he was not really responsible...