Deceptively innocuous, effectively murderous 

by Dilshan Boange

The involvement the US had in Indo-China was one of the great black scars on the image of the ‘land of the free’ due to the underhand covert subversive agendas it carried out that resulted in the debacle that was the Vietnam war (which the Vietnamese I believe refer to as the American war).

Many are the works of fiction and films that have been made over the course of the latter part of the last century capturing various facets of that horrendous war.

The Quiet American is a novel by English novelist Graham Greene’s adapted to the big screen as a movie directed by Phillip Noyce which starred veteran actor Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser as the seemingly innocuous deceptively venomous American. The performance by Michael Caine earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.

The story is set in Saigon, Vietnam in 1952, towards the end of the French war against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (1945-1954). The film shows a love story about the triangle that develops between Thomas Fowler, a British journalist in his fifties played by Caine, a young American idealist, supposedly an aid worker, named Alden Pyle played by Fraser and Phuong, a Vietnamese woman played by Do Thi Hai Yen. It is also themed on the growing American involvement that led to the full-scale American war in Vietnam.

Observer

The story is narrated by Fowler who is involved in the war only as a reporter, an uninvolved observer, apart from one crucial event. Pyle who represents America and its policies in Vietnam, is a CIA agent sent to manoeuvre the war according to America’s interests, and is passionately devoted to the ideas of York Harding, an American foreign policy theorist who said what Vietnam needed was a “third force” to take the place of both the colonialists and the Vietnamese rebels and restore order.

This supposedly anti-colonialist and anti-communist force was plainly meant to be America, and so Pyle sets about creating a “Third Force” against the Viet Minh by using a Vietnamese splinter group headed by corrupt militia leader General Thé.

His arming of Thé’s militia with American weaponry leads to a series of terrorist bombings in Saigon. These bombings, wrongly blamed on the Communists to further American outrage, claim many innocent lives including women and children.

Love interest

Pyle develops a love interest for Fowler’s Vietnamese mistress Phuong and manages to woo her to into his embrace promising her marriage and security, the former of which seems unlikely from her present lover the aged Fowler.

When Fowler finds out about Pyle’s involvement in the bombings, he is perturbed as to what deviousness is directing the fate of Vietnam. Fowler takes a decision to gamble all of their fates. He tacitly lends support to let his assistant, Hinh and his Communist comrades in arms confront Pyle. This results in Pyle trying to flee, and what ensues is Hinh fatally stabs the American aid worker-cum-veiled CIA man. Phuong subsequently returns to Fowler and while the local French police chief catches onto the involvement Fowler would have had in Pyle’s murder. However, due to no concrete evidence that implicates the British reporter Fowler is not let off the hook and the matter is not pursued.