The Quiet American (DVD)

Introduction Based on a book by Graham Greene, this is a film that I've been meaning to see for a while, so was delighted when I finally got hold of a copy. It didn't make a huge splash when it came out, but reviews I read made out that it was much better than the press it received. I was also interested in the setting for the film, 1950s Saigon, and the expatriate life that Caine portrays. I was slightly disappointed with the film - it was beautifully filmed and Caine does a superb job, but I felt he was let down by the other actors and the various threads of the storyline, which seemed to be cut short. The director Philip Noyce was born in the ...  Read the complete review

It’s great getting the house to yourself – watching whatever you like. I found this film and although it normally isn’t what I would watch I really did get engrossed in it and though it was not a film that you were meant to ‘enjoy’ or laugh at, it was certainly one that gave a piece of history and some of the things that might have happened then. The film is called ‘The Quiet American’ and begins with the death of the ‘Quiet American’. Michael Caines’ character is almost telling a story when it begins of Vietnam. People can’t remember what they went there to escape from and the gunshots become so familiar that they would think they were only fireworks. As you ...  Read the complete review

The Quiet American opens on a sultry night in 1952 with twinkling lights, faraway explosions and a body floating face down in the water. Called in by the ambivalent French colonial police, Thomas Fowler, The Times's man in Saigon, identifies the corpse as his friend Alden Pyle, a "quiet American." Time shifts abruptly back to their first meeting. A table in front of the Continental Hotel, the ageing Fowler (Michael Caine) all complacent routine and casual detachment as a sedentary foreign correspondent, the bespectacled Pyle (Brendan Fraser in his best role since Gods and Monsters) at once eager, earnest, well mannered and yet ever so vaguely ...  Read the complete review