New Picture

The Quiet American (Figaro; United Artists). "Innocence," wrote Graham Greene in the novel from which this film is somewhat speciously taken, "is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm." The leper of modern history, as Greene sees him, is the American--he of the "young and unused face" who has made "a profession of friendship, as though it were law or medicine," and who goes about the world infecting whole continents with the botch of good will. On one level the book is a passionate editorial against U.S. innocence abroad. On another it is, perhaps unconsciously, a revealing study of a new phenomenon of history: a British inferiority complex--the mixture of fury and self-pity with which the old cock of the walk surveys the new. On still another level the book is a nervous and indirect reconnaissance of the borders of that undiscovered country of love to which Greene is always journeying without ever quite arriving.

The picture is all these things too--and more, and less. Like the book, it profits from Greene's instinct for weaving the fictional web, for making life look marvelously complex and always come out even. But life is sometimes very odd indeed, and the story sometimes invites a suspicion that Greene has rigged his game --a suspicion certified by the ease with which the Englishman wins it, and by the oafishness with which the American loses. It is a cheap debating trick, and it cheapens the picture as it did the book. But the picture, in the last reel, suffers at the hands of Scriptwriter-Director Joseph Mankiewicz an even more drastic devaluation of its intellectual currency.

The American of the title is named Pyle (Audie Murphy), a Harvardman, about 32, working for a U.S. mission in the Federation of Indo-China in 1952. "With his gangly legs and his crew cut and his wide campus gaze he seemed incapable of harm." But he is an idealist. "He was determined to do good, to people, to countries, to the whole world." His naivete horrifies Greene's Englishman, a middle-aged newsman named Fowler (Michael Redgrave), whose pipedreams are provided by opium, and whose pipe is prepared by his pretty little Vietnamese mistress, Phuong. (Phuong is in the picture, but the opium is not.) Aside from Phuong (Giorgia Moll), the Englishman's principal passion is his uninvolvement, but the American wants to be mixed up in everything--particularly, Fowler decides, if it happens to be none of his damned business.

He gets mixed up, first of all, in Vietnamese politics, by supporting (with arms as well as money) a general through whom he hopes to create a "Third Force" between the local right and left. And he gets mixed up with Phuong. The American is terribly fair about the girl. He tells the Englishman, even before he tells Phuong, that he has fallen in love with her. He intends, he says, to marry her and take her back to "the folks in Texas," and he belligerently allows to Fowler (whose wife, back in England, will not give him a divorce) that "a woman's entitled to the security of marriage"--adding thoughtfully that of course "we both have her interests at heart." Fowler snaps back incredulously: "I don't care about her interests. I want her!" And still more incredulously he assists at a preposterous charade: he helps Pyle to propose to the girl he is sickeningly sure he cannot live without. "He wants to make you happy," he wearily translates, "and secure your future." Alas, Phuong cannot understand what Pyle means by "future," but she understands very well what he means by marriage, and she longs to see the Empire State Building. So when it becomes clear that Fowler cannot get a divorce, she goes to live with Pyle.

Thus with his good intentions the American has paved the road to hell for the Englishman. And soon he seems well on the way to killing the whole country with kindness. But before that can happen, the Englishman contrives, through the agency of some serviceable Communists, to kill the American. The book ended there, with the Englishman feeling very little pain. But the picture goes on, in a foolishly obvious attempt to sugar the pill so that U.S. moviegoers will swallow it, to take it all back about the American. It turns out he was not really responsible for the bomb that exploded in the crowd of shoppers--and so on. The Englishman, it seems, has simply been duped by the Communists. "I wish someone existed," he sobs at the finish, "to whom I could say I am sorry."

Despite the letdown at the end, the picture is well worth seeing for the buildup that precedes it. Mankiewicz is an intelligent director, and he keeps his actors on the jump and his story on the move. Moreover, for Americans, the picture carries a moral they will long have need to ponder: if it is more blessed to give than to receive, it is also a damned sight more difficult.

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