The Quiet American (1958) on Netflix
In 1952 Saigon, British journalist Thomas Fowler loves Phuong but is married and cannot marry her. A young American, Alden Pyle, arrives and begins to court her.
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Trailer
Plot summary
In 1952 Saigon, with the Indochina War going on, Thomas Fowler is a British journalist who loves Phuong, a young Vietnamese woman, and cannot marry her because he already has a wife. Alden Pyle, a young American, meets the two of them in a hotel lobby, where they talk about the war. Pyle asks them to the Rendez-Vous restaurant, dances with Phuong and meets her sister. He has joined forces with General Thé, a renegade commander who leads the Third Force, and he intends to make Phuong his wife. On the advice of his contact Dominguez, Fowler goes north, and while he is away word comes from London that he is to take charge of foreign news for his paper.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Quiet American (1958)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Humphrey Bogart was considered for the lead, and the part was actually offered to Montgomery Clift with Laurence Olivier set to play Fowler; both men left the project, Clift for health reasons, and Clift was replaced by Audie Murphy.
- Filming in Saigon, the crew avoided midday shooting because of harsh shadows, had trouble getting permission to film inside a Buddhist temple over religious scruples about the phase of the moon, and accidentally enabled a political protest the police assumed was staged for the film. Shooting also halted when Audie Murphy got appendicitis on a Hong Kong shopping trip and needed emergency surgery.
- Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the film's writer, director and producer, made Pyle an aid worker and private citizen instead of a representative of the American government and stressed the love triangle over the war's politics; Graham Greene disavowed the film, saying it seemed made deliberately to attack the book and its author.
- The Quiet American was the first feature film ever shot in Vietnam; filming began in Saigon on January 28, 1957, and moved to Rome, where it finished in late April.
- While writing the script, Mankiewicz received uncredited input from CIA officer Edward Lansdale, who was often said to have been Greene's model for the American character Pyle.
- According to Graham Greene, the model for Pyle was not CIA officer Edward Lansdale, whom Greene did not meet until after completing much of the novel, but Leo Hochstetter, an American public affairs director in Indochina the French assumed belonged to the CIA.
