The Quiet American (2002 film)

The Quiet American is a 2002 film adaptation of Graham Greenes bestselling novel of the same name. It was directed by Phillip Noyce and starred Michael Caine, Brendan Fraser, and Do Thi Hai Yen.

Set in 1952 in Saigon, Vietnam, toward the end of the French war against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam 19451954, on one level The Quiet American is a love story about the triangle that develops between Thomas Fowler, a British journalist in his fifties a young American idealist, supposedly an aid worker, named Alden Pyle and Phuong, a Vietnamese woman. On another level it is also about the growing American involvement that led to the fullscale American war in Vietnam.Thomas Fowler Michael Caine, who narrates the story, is involved in the war only as a reporter, an unengaged observer, apart from one crucial event. Pyle Brendan Fraser, who represents America and its policies in Vietnam, is a CIA operative sent to steer the war according to Americas interests, and is passionately devoted to the ideas of York Harding, an American foreign policy theorist who said that what Vietnam needed was a third force to take the place of both the colonialists and the Vietnamese rebels and restore order. This supposedly anticolonialist and anticommunist force was plainly meant to be America, and so Pyle sets about creating a Third Force against the Viet Minh by using a Vietnamese splinter group headed by corrupt militia leader General Th based on the actual Trinh Minh The. His arming of Ths militia with American weaponry leads to a series of terrorist bombings in Saigon. These bombings, dishonestly blamed on the Communists in order to further American outrage, kill a number of innocent people, including women and children. ........

Source: Wikipedia