Our Man in Saigon

In the new film version of The Quiet American, a photographer races into a plaza in downtown Saigon, rather puzzling jaded British reporter Thomas Fowler (Michael Caine). Moments later, a car bomb strews shattered bodies and vehicles around the plaza. We hear another bomb explode nearby. Then we see the supposedly innocent American, Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser), ordering the photographer to focus on dead bodies and the most hideously wounded survivors.

Moviegoers familiar with Graham Greene's novel may wonder why director Phillip Noyce is taking such liberties with this crucial scene. Why insert a photographer? Isn't adding a second bomb a bit of cinematic overkill? And where's the novel's dazed, confused Alden Pyle, stumbling with his impenetrable American innocence through the carnage he didn't really intend to cause?

But this scene, like other twists in the film, actually moves deeper into what Greene discovered in the early 1950s about the figure he called the Quiet American--charmingly boyish, impregnably armored in ignorance, righteousness and good intentions, dedicated to replicating America around the world, preaching democracy and spewing bombs in Vietnam. It also moves The Quiet American into the twenty-first century, with piercing relevance to the "War on Terror."

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