Volume 50, Number 2 · February 13, 2003
The Unquiet Englishman
By Pico Iyer
The Quiet American
directed by Phillip Noyce, based on the novel by Graham Greene
Graham Greene's work is almost too easy to film, not least because, as a film critic for The Spectator for four years in the Thirties, he took in movies every week and reflected often on how the camera had changed the way we tell stories and think about perspective. Though a compulsive reader himself, he was never scornful of the cinema's (or anything's) mass appeal—the aim, he felt, in books and in films, was to excite the audience first and then lead it into ever deeper considerations of right and wrong—and much of the power of his novels comes from their ingenious structuring. The Quiet American, for example, begins at the end and shuffles backward and forward, mixing anticipation and retrospection, until we don't know whether we're in a romance or a tragedy. More than anything, Greene had, instinctively, the charged compression that all film aims at (when the Englishman Fowler, in The Quiet American, tells a French friend he's 'going back,' the Frenchman says, 'You're going home?' 'No,' says Fowler. 'England').
Review, 2915 words
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