The Quiet American

The mood of wry disillusion that seeps through the screen adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel “The Quiet american” is sounded in the movie’s opening moments by the voice of Michael Caine musing dreamily on the mystique of Saigon in the early 50’s. It is a place, declares his character, Thomas Fowler, where colors and tastes seem sharper than they do elsewhere and where even the rain has a special intensity. Fowler is a wistfully cynical British journalist who has fled an arid marriage in England to live in Southeast Asia, where he is reporting on the Vietnamese fight for independence from French colonial rule. His attitude toward the political turmoil swirling around him is one of studied detachment bordering on disinterest. (...) Fowler may be the richest character of Caine’s screen career. Slipping into his skin with an effortless grace, this great english actor gives a performance of astonishing understatement whose tone wavers delicately between irony and sadness. (Stephen Holden, 2002)