Review: The Quiet American (15)

AN INTRIGUING mix of political thriller and love story set in the last days of French colonial rule in Indo-China, The Quiet American is an enjoyable if unspectacular film.

It stars Michael Caine in a typically polished performance that has many already mentioning the words Oscar nomination. He plays a world-weary journalist, Thomas Fowler, from The Times, desperately decent and trying to cling onto his exotic and easy life in Saigon with a beautiful Vietnamese girl Phuong, young enough to be his granddaughter.

Based on a novel by the great Graham Greene and a remake of a 1958 film directed by Joseph L Mankiewicz, starring American war hero Audie Murphy and Michael Redgrave, this version restores the author's anti-American sentiment which incensed him when it was left out of the original.

Fowler's life is turned upside down firstly by the arrival of the Quiet American, Alden Pyle, played by Brendan Fraser.

Pyle is a doctor with the US government who are keen on replacing the vacuum soon to be left by the French in Indo-China and are already pumping millions of dollars of aid into the country.

The American is head over heels in love with Phuong and makes no attempt to hide his desires from Fowler and despite their rivalry for her affections, the two become friends.

Secondly, Fowler's newspaper are despairing at his poor efforts at work.

One the movie's few comic moments occurs when Fowler, bemoaning the foreign newsdesk's insistence that he return to London, asks his Vietnamese assistant how many stories he has sent them over the year.

When he is told that it is only three, he replies, "Oh, s***."

Thirdly, Fowler's life is further complicated by the fact that he is already married in Britain to a Catholic, a favourite Greene topic, who refuses to grant him a divorce thus preventing him from marrying Phuong and taking her home.

His mistress is also beginning to think that she may be better off with the young, rich and available American.

With his life falling apart he decides that desperate times require desperate measures and leaves the comfort of his desk in Saigon to cover the war in the jungle with the French army losing to the Viet Minh.

Without giving too much away, watch out for Caine's incredible acting when he loses his girl as well, as the way Greene portrays a sinister CIA making sure that America replaces the French after they throw in the towel - and how ordinary Vietnamese people were considered expendable by them in the pursuit of Cold War victory.

Mono rating: 8 out of 10.

Now showing at the UGC Cinemas in Newport and Cardiff.