Drugstore.com Coupons
Redgrave has an unloved wife back home, but his true passion is for Phuong (Giorgia Moll), a prim and submissive beauty half his age. He wants nothing more than to stay in Saigon, live with his docile Asian hottie, and avoid the war up north as well as the wife back home.
His rather selfish plans are upset by the arrival of Audie Murphy, an idealistic (yet mysterious) American businessman. Murphy quickly decides that he could use a sweet-natured Geisha servant girl as well, and the fact that she currently belongs to Redgrave only brings out his competitive nature. Worn-out Redgrave becomes jealous of his younger rival, enough to make him susceptible to a diabolical Communist plot to implicate Murphy as a mass-murdering saboteur. As if American war hero Audie Murphy would ever do such a thing.
How I felt about it. This intellectual exercise is two-thirds romantic triangle, and one part murder mystery. The 'mystery' aspect is more interesting, because of the politics involved. The Quiet American was made by an American studio for an American audience, and an American hero-moviestar plays the title character. This means that Murphy's character was modified from the Greene source novel. Murphy becomes a goody-goody who wants to make money by selling plastic goods to the Saigonese. This is all he is, never mind that he appears to be a spy for the Americans, dispatched to negotiate with powerful local political and military strategists nominally neutral between the French and Communists. Which is presumably why the Communists want to kill him, and not because he threatens to corner the Chinese New Year party favor market. The "quiet" American isn't particularly quiet.
In the first half of the film, Redgrave is the realist whose ideas about the French, the Communists, the people, and the war (reflecting those of author Greene) prove remarkably prescient. Yet he is impotent, and the war must move on inexorably until both the French and their American successors learn their lessons. Meanwhile, Murphy is the naive boy scout, playing fair in a treacherous land and damned lucky to escape so far without a scratch.
The tide turns in the film's second half. Redgrave tells a big lie to keep Phuong as his young servant-mistress. This lie backfires, then Redgrave procedes to make a complete fool of himself trying to get Phuong back. Meanwhile, Inspector Vigot (Claude Dauphin) seems to know everything, and since he will also tell you everything, be sure to ask him tonight's powerball number. We like the movie's first half better. But the second half is also educational.