The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam

by Max Boot

If The Quiet American, the novel, was anti-American, the movie version, which came out in 1958, was very different. In the movie, Trinh Minh Thé is not really responsible for the terrorist bombings in Saigon—the Vietminh are. Thé, along with the Alden Pyle character (played rather woodenly by war hero Audie Murphy), is framed by the Communists. Thomas Fowler (the veteran English actor Michael Redgrave) sets up Pyle to be killed by the Vietminh not because of his revulsion at Pyle’s complicity in terrorism but because he is a Communist dupe who is intensely jealous of Pyle for stealing his Vietnamese girlfriend, Phuong—played, bizarrely, by the Italian actress Giorgia Moll. The cinematic version ends with Inspector Vigot (Claude Dauphin), the detective investigating Pyle’s murder, telling Fowler that he has been “used” and “childishly manipulated” by the Communists: “If you will pardon my attempt at colloquial English, Mr. Fowler, they have made a bloody fool of you.” This was a neat inversion of Greene’s plot, one that infuriated the author, who later decried the “treachery” of the film’s writer and director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz.58 (The second movie version of The Quiet American, starring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser, would be more faithful to the novel, but Greene would not live to see its release in 2002.) What Greene may not have realized was that Edward Lansdale had taken a considerable hand in altering the movie’s political message to make it pro-American. Lansda...