Political Theatre - Part 1 - The Quiet American

This afternoon during a button twiddling session in front of my family brain docking and memory wipe system, technically called a flat screen for its incredible ability to flatten points of view into single dimensions and to reduce the many folds of the brain into the torpid flatness of a greasy chain store pizza, I made my usual pit stop on channel 81 - TCM. It is one of my favourite channels. If you manage to catch it on the occasions when they play solid hollywood fare (noir, early silents, hard boiled Cagney or Bogie joints, 70s NY cinema etc) or on late night excursions when they have excellent foreign selections and avoid the overrated technicolour melodramas, Cary Grant romantic comedy marathons and dodge the escapist,white washed musicals one is guaranteed a good return on time spent.

I happened to land on TCM midway through what I later found out was the 1958 version of Graham Greene's -"The Quiet American" and quickly made the judgement that it would be well worth watching. This film deals with aspects of neo - colonialism and the idea of intervention, and the difficulty of maintaining political neutrality as seen through the actions of a British journalist caught in the middle of a love triangle. I must say that it is somewhat irresponsible of me to review this film without having seen it front to back or without having read the book it is based on. I will remedy the situation by getting a netflix copy of the movie and altering this review if I find any glaring errors in my analysis or my understanding of the plot. I think however that I got the thread of the story well enough to make the points I make and I read some plot summaries to fill the gaps in my knowledge. Also the readers may be interested to know that they remade this movie in 2002 with Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser. I wonder how they spun it this time around.

First of all I thought the movie, helmed by veteran director Joeseph Mankiewicz, was technically well made. The settings and outdoor shots seemed very authentic and I saw none of the shoddy studio shots of false, painted horizons and the mannered acting that mar a lot of older films. The only clue one has that it was filmed in Italy is the names painted on some of the sign boards and the relative lack of grime as could be expected in 50s Vietnam. The bit players looked pretty authentically Asiatic even if they seemed a little too westernised to be completely believable. Having passed the important first test of believability I found myself being able to accept the story being conveyed quite easily. Later, upon doing some IMDB digging I found out that the Asian female protagonist Phuong was played by Giorgia Moll - an Italian! Just the day before I saw Paul Muni in "The Good Earth" playing a character called Wang! However both these performances were pretty believable and not the grotesque parodies that some examples of yellowface or blackface can be so I was inclined to forgive them. (not sure though if Moll was of Asian descent so forgive me if I am wrong about this)

This movie, like most Hollywood movies based in Vietnam focuses on the Western characters and their power games in the midst of the personality devoid ethnic masses that fill out the frame in crowded marketplaces or in ballrooms and battle scenes. I happened to jump into the movie right in the middle of a pivotal scene where the older, more cynical British journalist Thomas Fowler is trapped in an observation tower with the younger American transplant(Audie Murphy) and two South Vietnamese soldiers. The American is an idealist who believes in bringing American style democracy to Vietnam, what he calls the third way, an alternative to homegrown communism and french colonialism. The Brit however is worldly wise and claims to be neutral to politics. The film was made in 1958, one year before American soldiers entered Vietnam and provides us an interesting view into the minds of American policies and thinking of that era.

As the two joust over politics we never hear what the soldiers might be thinking - they remain completely silent throughout the scene and only participate in the gunfight at the end that kills them both while the westerners escape narrowly. Indeed the only intimation we get of their thoughts is through the journalist's words when he tells Audie Murphy that they most likely don't have a political viewpoint but only fight for survival. Whether it is true or not, there is no clarification from the soldier's themselves. This argument presages several other Hollywood failures in making movies about the Vietnamese intervention; failures like 'Platoon' where the entire war is cast as a moral struggle for the American soul that only incidentally involves the inhuman, chattering, faceless Vietnamese soldiers. The left leaning Oliver Stone made the same mistake that the America-centric Mankiewicz made 30 years earlier, that of presuming to speak for the oriental other. A year before the American intervention in Vietnam, this movie already casts the American point of view and the western journalistic point of view as being more important than that of a native soldier's. The scene ends with the American risking his life to save the Brit's. In the end he is repaid for his kindness to the Brit by betrayal because he wins the heart and mind of the Vietnamese girl who has become disillusioned with the deceptions of the desperate journalist.

As the movie went on, one could see the director's point of view quiet clearly. The entire film is a propaganda effort aimed at proving the superiority of the American interventionist point of view in Vietnam. The wholesome American, because of his strong morals (as a church going do - gooder who romances the girl in an earnest fashion with an eye towards legitimising their relationship with a marriage) has the correct politics. The atheistic journalist who is willing to lie about getting a divorce from his absent wife to keep the girl, in other words a weak and decadent loser has the wrong idea about leaving Vietnam alone. His personal weakness makes him a natural fit for collaborating with the commies and his pretense to journalistic/political neutrality is easily shaken when his grip on his girl slackens. In other words, the right kind of love presages the right kind of politics in the director's rigid world view.

I understand that this is very different from the book where the American is shown in a less sympathetic light. Greene meant to show the imbecility of the American mindset when it came to stopping communism from spreading in third world countries. However since this movie was made just after the anti communist purge of Hollywood and on the eve of the Vietnam war the story was completely turned around and the British journalist and the commies depicted as villains. In the movie the American agent's politics are right because his personality is true and righteous - we get no real evidence that his politics are right because of the good they do for the Vietnamese people. He is depicted at first as a shady importer of plastics, which may or may not be used to make bombs,but eventually turns out to be a harmless capitalist idealist. On the other hand the Brit with his tendency towards journalistic impartiality and hence weak mindedness makes a fatal error of judgement, eventually succumbing to the seduction of the communistic viewpoint. As a result he betrays everyone around him and does wrong.

You are either with us or against us, the director says, and if you are against us then you are a terrorist(here a commie hit squad) sympathizer and an evil hedonist. The only right path is that of Godliness and free enterprise. You have to accept all the tenets of the American way piecemeal- the religion, the labour policies, the aggressive foreign policy, sanctity of marriage, the mainstream in all it's manifestations, if you want to escape the black hole of relativism and contradictions of opposing points of view. This movie is as relevant now as it was back then if you deconstruct its many ideological fallacies and compare them to the Neo-Con mindset. Seems like every war effort requires this kind of marshaling of values in order to ensure the defeat of internal opposition to conflict. When the initial invasion of Iraq ended the bush admin made sure to send its own idealistic republican youth brigade which was thoroughly vetted for personal politics. It became more important to have pro life conservatives in charge of running the various bureaucracies in charge of reconstruction than the most qualified experts in the field in question. Restarting business in the Baghdad stock exchange was a major priority for the people in charge of resuscitating life in that country - all because of the foolish idealism of war planners who believed exporting their mode of life was necessary for Iraqi freedom. The leap from Neo - Col to Neo - Con took 40 years and happened despite the lessons of Algeria and Vietnam.

The movie ends with a thanks to the 'government chosen by the people of Vietnam'(paraphrase) - as long as the government was a democratic government run along the lines of western examples one supposes. Communism could never be a free choice of the people but could only be an aberration in thinking that came about as a result of an incontinent morality. The only right choice is the true one of "freedom" with its blazoning bugles. The only true end of adult life is the bourgeoisie family unit with religion and state providing the backbone for a man's development. What a load of tripe we swallowed for centuries and whose cud we are still chewing on!

Here is an interesting fact - In a speech Bush gave in Aug of 2007 he had the audacity to reference the Alden Pyle character from the book - the same quiet American who creates the big mess - in support of American intervention to spread democracy. The irony of using a character conceived of as an embodiment of American idealism gone awry in an international intervention situation seemed to have escaped Bush's feeble attempts at speechifying. He ignored the bumbling idiocy of this character and instead used him as a segue to talk about the disastrous withdrawal from Saigon in 75. This is typical of Bush myth making - ignoring the misguided invasion that led to the withdrawal and instead focusing on the effects of such a withdrawal on international perception of American strength. What Bush - McCain want is for us to forget the lies and failures that set off this whole process - they want us to take an ahistorical view in order to excise and excuse failure and deception. Sorry Mr. President and Mr. Yesident that is impossible to do except unless we engage in some serious Orwellian doublethink. Just as watching this pro - American movie does not change the original story that Graham Greene meant to tell in his book. History came along and showed us the stupidity of pretending that the Vietnam adventure was anything but a colossal mistake. The movie became instantly invalidated and Greene's original point of view held fast because it was written from a perspective of reality - not idealistic hubris like the director's or Bush's point of view.

All said I would recommend this film as essential viewing because of the skill of Michael Redgrave in playing a complex and unsympathetic part in such a way that we are forced to empathise with the human motivations that drive him to do wrong. The interesting back story of the book and film versions also make it a fascinating study of the subversive politics of literary adaptations and mass media manipulation of an author's ideas.