Reply #26: Does the movie say Third Way in Vietnam had backing of CIA [View All]

[madfloridian]

http://www.rambles.net/quiet_amer02.html

"They say you can come to Vietnam and you learn a lot in a few minutes," Fowler says as the film opens, adding: "The rest has got to be lived." And live Fowler does, in spite of bombings, in spite of attempts to send him back to London, in spite of attempts on his life by members of the Third Way, in spite of that body found floating in the river which touches off Fowler's flashback to events surrounding Pyle's arrival.

And learn he does: that the Third Way seems to have the backing of CIA officials, that there's something phony about the massacres that are being blamed on the communists, that the plastic material supposedly imported by Pyle for his medical aid project also can be used to create explosives. All these crosscurrents make for one maelstrom of a movie -- enough to shatter, momentarily at least -- even an Englishman's stiff upper lip. But The Quiet American is about much more than plots and counterplots.

Like Graham Greene's Third Man, which was released just a few years before Quiet American takes place, it's about people -- fetching but flawed people, kicked into action by facts they don't want to know."

I realize it is a movie based on a novel, but how very "in your face" to call a part of our Democratic Party by that name.