Word: pyles
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...what did happen to the photographers and the seven South Vietnamese soldiers traveling with them? Lost over Laos is cast as a mystery, "a story waiting to be finished," say authors Richard Pyle and Horst Faas, though from the outset the facts are fairly clear. The helicopter carrying Burrows and co., who were covering a doomed U.S.-supported offensive into Laos to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail, received a direct hit from enemy antiaircraft fire and plunged burning into the jungle. Chances of survival: almost nil. For Pyle and Faas, a reporter and a photographer who covered the Vietnam...
...stars Oscar-nominated Michael Caine as Thomas Fowler, the middle-aged London Times foreign correspondent covering the French-Indochina war in Saigon. Fowler, who lives in Vietnam with a beautiful ex-taxi dancer named Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen), finds this lifestyle imperiled when a young American doctor, Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser), falls in love with Phuong and tries to wrest her away. As the eponymous “quiet American,” Pyle is rather the opposite—his naive idealism and fervent democratic bent wreak havoc in issues apart from the cynical Fowler?...
...Stacks writes that his subject, James (Scotty) Reston of the New York Times, was "the best journalist of his time, and perhaps the best of any time." This is a stretch. The saving grace of journalism is that it has room for so many varied methods and practitioners. Ernie Pyle, Robert Capa and Edward R. Murrow all covered the same war but in different ways; it's senseless to try to rank them...
...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...
...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...