Word: fowler
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...three people at the story's center?Pyle (Brendan Fraser), the older English reporter Thomas Fowler (Caine) and local lovely Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen), whom the two men covet, conquer and betray?can be seen as representing the Americans, Europeans and Vietnamese of the early '50s, dancing on a slippery geopolitical slope that leads straight into the Big Muddy. They are also familiar figures in the Greene canon. The Quiet American is very nearly Greene's remake of The Third Man, his 1949 tale of political and sexual intrigue set in postwar Vienna, with the same cast of characters...
...watchful, wary Fowler is closer to Greene, for whom cynicism was just a dirty word for realism. He is beguiled by Pyle because of the American's very blandness; a man so open must be hiding something. Even Pyle's declaration of love for Phuong has to be the cover story for a more nefarious agenda. When the movie had a special showing last month at the Toronto Film Festival, Caine called the film "a cautionary tale. And the caution is: Don't try to take a 20-year-old girl away from a 68-year...
...Fowler and Pyle are two prickly points on the oldest triangle. Each man truly loves Phuong; it is the one selfless emotion they share. In Greene's world, love revs the heart rate and clouds the vision. So does political idealism. Both feelings can compel sporting chaps to commit indecent acts?like stealing a friend's woman, or conniving in a man's murder?with the justification that the worst thing to do was somehow the only right thing. "Sooner or later," a canny Vietnamese tells Fowler, "one has to take sides if one is to remain human." It sounds...
...countries that double for Vietnam. It just wouldn't have been Vietnam, and that sense of the immediate and historical setting?the scene of the crime, if you will?was essential to the film's emotional veracity. (The first, 1958 version of The Quiet American, with Michael Redgrave as Fowler and war hero Audie Murphy as Pyle, was also shot partly in Vietnam.) "I've seen Vietnam pictures shot in Thailand and the Philippines," says Caine, "but you never get those incredible mountains and mists. In our film, you see those and you are immediately in Vietnam...
...more kibitzers. One day a heavy mist draped the mountains of Binh Dinh and sank into the rice paddies in the valleys below. An ancient Citro?n spun its wheels on the muddy track, in a scene that would bring Fowler to a rebel leader's camp in the Vietnam of 1953. Suddenly Noyce shouted and pointed at a tree line: "Somebody do something about those kids!" Two boys had climbed some bamboo trees and were swaying at the top, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-style. Very cute, but it ruined the shot. A translator pleaded for the children to come down...