The Quiet American

Saigon in the early fifties. Fowler, a cynical English journalist, has lived there for years and is with a young Vietnamese woman. Then an American official appears: well-meaning, naive, and in love with the same woman. What is between the two men gets pulled into a political calculation, and Fowler makes a choice. It is adapted from Graham Greene's 1955 novel, but Joseph L. Mankiewicz reversed the politics of it: the American who is a dangerous interventionist in the book becomes an innocent victim on screen, and Fowler becomes a man who was duped. Greene was openly furious about the change. So what is on the screen is both Greene's story and an answer to it, sitting in the same film.