Trivia

The first Hollywood movie made in Vietnam.

Source novelist Graham Greene said of his source novel of the same name in "Ways of Escape", pgs.139-140: "When my novel was eventually noticed in the New Yorker, the reviewer condemned me for accusing my "best friends" (the Americans) of murder since I had attributed to them the responsibility for the great explosion - far worse than the trivial bicycle bombs - in the main square of Saigon when many people lost their lives. But what are the facts, of which the reviewer needless to say was ignorant? The Life photographer at the moment of the explosion was so well placed that he was able to take an astonishing and horrifying photograph which showed the body of a trishaw driver still upright after his legs had been blown off. This photograph was reproduced in an American propaganda magazine published in Manila over the title 'The work of Ho Chi Minh' although General Thé had promptly and proudly claimed the bomb as his own. Who had supplied the material to a bandit who was fighting French, Caodaists, and Communists? . . . Perhaps there is more direct rapportage in the The Quiet American than in any other novel I have written. I had determined to employ again the experience I had gained with The End of the Affair in the use of the first person and the time shift, and my choice of a journalist as the 'I' seemed to me to justify the use of rapportage. The Press conference is not the only example of direct reporting. I was in the dive bomber (the pilot had broken an order of General de Lattre by taking me) which attacked the Viet Minh post and I was on the patrol of the Foreign Legion paras outside Phat Diem. I still retain the sharp image of the dead child couched in the ditch beside his dead mother. The very neatness of their bullet wounds made their death more disturbing than the indiscriminate massacre in the canals around."

In Europe, writer, producer, and director Joseph L. Mankiewicz was savagely attacked for his movie's infidelity to the source novel by Graham Greene, not least by Greene himself. The screenplay essentially turns the novel inside-out, so that the blundering "quiet American", whose extreme naiveté causes tragedy and his own death despite his having only the best of intentions, is transformed into a shrewd and heroic figure, far wiser and more honorable than his British rival. Mankiewicz later referred to the movie as "very bad" (although he also liked to point out that Jean-Luc Godard had called it the best movie of its year) and claimed that he had not been able to concentrate on the movie because of the mental collapse of his wife, Rose Stradner, who committed suicide soon after he had finished it.

Writer, producer, and director Joseph L. Mankiewicz originally wanted Montgomery Clift and Sir Laurence Olivier to play the lead central male characters of The American and Thomas Fowler, who were in the end portrayed instead by Audie Murphy and Sir Michael Redgrave, respectively.

The opening prologue states: "There was an emperor - who ruled by permission of France to whom it belonged - and 300 miles to the north of Saigon, both the emperor and the French were fighting a war against a Communist army. But, at war or in peace, CHINESE NEW YEAR was a time to forgive one's enemies, square accounts with one's God and creditors - and to reside in a world that, for two days, might be considered a happy one."