Word: quieted
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...story of the first major American-backed movie made in Vietnam since the war may offer instruction. Phillip Noyce's version of the 1955 Graham Greene novel The Quiet American deals with that time in the '50s when French colonialists were stumbling out of Vietnam and U.S. "advisers" were tiptoeing in. Despite the mounting carnage, Americans held fast to what they considered their ideals. As Alden Pyle, Greene's title character, says of one fatal explosion on a Saigon street: "What happened in the Square today makes me sick. But in the long run I'm gonna save lives...
...positive reaction when he showed a rough cut of the film to his sponsors at Miramax Films in New York. The date of that screening was Sept. 10, 2001. Events in New York the following day changed many things; one was the studio's response to The Quiet American. In an interview last week with the New York Times, Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein says he was told, "You can't release this now: it's unpatriotic." The company shelved this "movie about bad Americans" for more than a year. It finally opens in the U.S. next month...
...filmmakers say they're not finger pointing. "The movie isn't anti-American," says Michael Caine, whose career-capping performance guarantees him an aisle seat on Oscar Night. "It's anti the people who took America into the Vietnam War." The Quiet American dares to pose questions with no easy answers?perhaps no answers at all. That alone makes this one of the year's most thoughtful films. It happens also to be a poignant, visually ravishing parable of lust and rancor set in a paradise lost...
...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: a world-weary Englishman; an exotic woman bound to an unscrupulous lover; and an American who could be naive or a killer...
...filmed in any of the usual 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...