The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

I read the book and saw the 2002 film version. This film is a partial misreading of the book, and the 2002 version is much better. In terms of acting, characterization, and other film elements, this movie does very well, though.

I've now seen the two versions of this movie, based on this Graham Greene's novel. Though the 2002 version with Michael Cain and Brendan Fraser is supposed to be more faithful to Green's novel, I much prefer the story that is presented in this 1958 version. On TCM, Ben Mankiewicz said that, for marketing reasons, the story in this version (directed by his uncle) had to be toned down to make it less anti-American than the novel. He also said that Audie Murphy was probably chosen for the title role because he was a well-known actor-war hero (a Congressional Metal of Honor winner who played himself in the autobiographical war movie, To Hell and Back.) Though this wide-screen, black-and-white movie about two men in far-off place, called Vietnam, then failed at the box office, the locale of its story would come back to haunt us for decades to come.Neither Audie Murphy nor Brendan Fraser stand out as actors that we tend to think of a 'top-notch.' But, ironically, the acting of the movie's title character doesn't need to be particularly great, just adequate. Both versions of this movie are more about THE MYSTERY of quiet American, Alden Pyle and what he is doing in Vietnam in 1952, than they are about the characters themselves. So, Audie Murphy (and Brendan Fraser in the 2002 version) only had to basically 'show up' in the movie to have the story work well. BUT FIRST, let's consider the plot of the 1958 movie, with cross-references to the actors that played the same characters in the boring 2002 version. As the movie opens, the people of Saigon are in the streets celebrating the Chinese New Year (Tet) with parades of noise makers, masks, and paper dragons. During the celebration, a Vietnamese man discovers the body of a white man, lying face down in the river. The body is that of Alden Pyle (Audie Murphy)(Brendan Fraser in 2002 version). Police Inspector Vigot (Claude Dauphin)(Rade Serbedzija in 2002 version) calls in a British journalist, Thomas Fowler (Michael Redgrave)(Micheal Caine in 2002 version), to identify the body. Fowler is also questioned about HIS whereabouts at the time of the suspected murder. At this point, there is a flashback that takes Fowler's recollections back to when and how he first met Pyle and what their relationship had been like during their acquaintance...Basically, they met since they were both white men working in an Asian country, and they tended to go to the same social clubs and restaurants to relax with other English-speaking people. When Pyle first meets Fowler, Fowler is accompanied by his live-in Vietnamese girlfriend, Phuong (Giorgia Moll—Do)(Thi Hai Yen in the 2002 version). While dancing with Phuong at one of the European clubs, Pyle is taken with her. When Pyle learns from Fowler that he is separated from his wife (who still lives in England and refuses to give him a divorce), he honorably tells Fowler that he wants to openly court Phuong. Fowler reluctantly offers to translate (English to French) Pyle's intentions to Phuong. Pyle tells Phunog that he loves her and wants to marry her and take her back to the US: he wants to offer her a future, away from Vietnam. This is something that Fowler—as a married man--can't do. But, Fowler deeply loves Phuong and wants to continue to life with her in Vietnam. The tension of the love triangle is heightened because Phunong's older sister is trying to look out for Phunong's future by hooking her up with the idealized 'rich American man from New York.' The fact that Pyle is neither rich nor from New York is only a minor problem for Phunong and her controlling sister. So, Phunong does leave Fowler for Pyle (respectfully living apart while courting).As a journalist looking for a story to keep his job in Vietnam, Fowler travels to Hanoi in the North. There, there is a Communist offensive against the French. When he arrives in the embattled North, he is surprised to find Pyle there too. But, why would Pyle there when his business is plastics? What do plastics have to do with an offensive in the North? Pyle tells Fowler that he just came up to see him and see the action for himself, but why? As the two return home in a jeep, they breakdown on the road and are attacked by Communist forces. Pyle then saves Fowler's life, and they return safely to Saigon. While Fowler is ready to believe the worst about Pyle's third force, a fellow British reporter puts him in contact with a Vietnamese friend. The friend leads him to think the worst about Pyle and his reason for being in Vietnam. (Plastics are used in toys but they are also use in explosives.) When circumstantial evidence confirms the Vietnamese contact's incriminating evidence against Pyle, Fowler's ideas only seem more solid. The final outcome of this movie reveals more about Fowler and Pyle, and it has a quirky twist to it. In spite of what other reviewers and critics have said about THIS version of Green's novel, I find it far superior to the later, more true-to-the-novel 2002 version (with the 20-20 hindsight epilogue). To me, there is nothing, whatsoever, corny about the ending of this version. In fact, I think that it is very ingenious!! It weaves political intrigue and a murder mystery together and shows how even an objective investigative journalist can be duped when his own ego is involved.

The Quiet American (1958)I think this is an extraordinary film. At the time, Americans didn't like it because it made them look bad, and the writer of the book it is based on, Graham Greene, didn't like it because it changed too much of his anti-American plot. But as a film, whatever its blurring of truth to history, is true about human nature. The credit for this goes not only to Greene, the enormously gifted writer and co-screenwriter, but also to the director, one of the lesser known American masters at telling a romantic story, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who also helped with the screenplay. The two are a perfect match, really, because both are all about subtlety and observation. Greene in particular has a way of bringing up the biggest issues in the most intimate and delicate ways, never grandiose, always psychologically sharp. And that is carried forward here in Vietnam a decade before the American War of the 1960s. The Communists are already fighting in the north, the French are getting ready to abandon the country to the Americans, and a British reporter is the center of our attention, not quite on anyone's side.There are two key characters, the reporter played with astonishing depth and acumen by Michael Redgrave, and "the American", played toward a caricature by Audie Murphy, with enough twists to his character to avoid over-stereotyping.Greene's observations of American do-good naiveté are fascinating, and the way this gets mixed (poisoned) with American meddling and military subversion is way ahead of its time. Or is it? It might be simply observant of the facts in 1950s Vietnam. Greene was a reporter himself there then, and after this book was published he was followed by American Intelligence until his death in 1991. One of the brilliant aspects of this movie is how it is not simply a love story, but has a trenchant, disturbing comment to make about world affairs, from the inside.Still, love intrudes, and the crossed loves of the two men for the same young Vietnamese woman is less clichéd than you might expect. The story is moving without being sentimental. And all of this is layered up with the actual Imperialist/Colonialist facts of the time. The conflicting sides of a war that few really understood (it seems) until twenty years later are here in their full formed germinations. Unlike the Michael Caine version of the same story (from 2002), this one was made before history had unfolded. It's endlessly almost chillingly fascinating, even though Greene's anti-war (and somewhat anti-American) tone was largely removed. The later movie might be closer to the book, but it feels like a movie made about history, not one that predicts it. There are some scenes here, priceless ones, shot in Vietnam in 1958, the rest is done (with terrific light and set design) in an Italian film studio. Greene was British and the production Italian, but Mankiewicz was American, and fully steeped in American filmmaking and myth making. It's this last aspect that is key--the movie is made to the highest standards of 1940s American melodramas, even having an echo (in terms of light and drama and style) of William Wyler's "The Letter" also set in Southeast Asia. The filming is astonishing--the photography is in the hands of Robert Krasker, who shot "The Third Man" and "Brief Encounter" to give you an idea of the moody richness of his style. And as a melodrama it comes down to the crumbling personal world of Fowler. At the end, in the busy night streets of a chaotic Saigon, he says, "I wish there was someone to whom I could say I'm sorry." I found it the final moving, beautiful strain of truth and pathos in a very special movie.

Personally, I thought this movie never really found its direction. One of the advantages of a novel (this is based on one by Graham Greene) is that it can go in many different directions successfully and work very well because the written word allows for a much fuller depiction of what's happening. If you translate the novel into a movie, though, you're dealing with a more limited medium and it's a lot harder to make multiple story lines work. So - what was this? Part Cold War thriller, part murder mystery, part romance, with various other things thrown in, mixed together and ending up as mush.There were parts of this that I enjoyed. Generally, I thought that Peter Redgrave as Fowler (a middle aged, jaded British journalist) and Audie Murphy as "The American" put on pretty decent performances, I appreciated the look (somewhat limited but still present) at Vietnamese culture, and I also appreciated the portrayal of the very early years of the Vietnam War, when it was still the French dealing with a Communist insurgency in what was then an integral part of their Empire. It was an interesting look at that aspect of the Cold War. Not really anti-Communist, as one might expect from the era, but somewhat anti-everything. In that sense, the movie took on Fowler's jaded personality. Starting with the American's murder, the story revolves around the search for the killer and I didn't find that part to be particularly interesting. Unfortunately, that's the bulk of the movie. Woefully underused and under-appreciated, I thought, was Giorgia Moll as Phuong, the young Vietnamese girl who becomes a love interest to both Fowler and the American. One wonders why an Italian born actress was cast as a Vietnamese (not a single Asian actress was around in 1958?) but more disappointing was that she had little to do except sip her ever-present milkshakes.Frankly, I found most of this dreadfully boring. 3/10