Indo China Rice fields

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00:00

Streets of French Indo-China

Actor: " … in Indo-China I drained a magic potion, a loving cup which I have shared since with many retired ‘colons’ and officers of the Foreign Legion whose eyes light up at the mention of Saigon and Hanoi."

00:13

Maher: French Indochina cast a spell over Graham Greene. Its people, its landscape, its opium dens -- and, of course, its wars -- captivated the English writer, sweeping him away on an intoxicating journey.

At journey’s end, Greene had harvested the grist for one of his most celebrated novels. A work of remarkable foresight, The Quiet American stared down the future and foretold the terrible tragedies that lay ahead, borne of Washington’s meddling in a nation it didn’t understand.

00:36

Film Location

Assistant Director: Okay, stand by now, here we go.

01:20

Noyce: Action!

01:29

Maher: On a set in old Hanoi, Australian director Philip Noyce is a picture of jagged intensity. For the past five years, filming The Quiet American has been his passion.

01:33

Noyce: Straight in the camera!

01:46

Noyce: Here is a novel that asked and answered the question before it even became a question – a novel that looked into the future and explained why America would prosecute this war against Vietnam for so long and so vehemently.

01:52

Noyce

What in the American psyche, in the personality of the post-war Americans that drove them to prosecute that war in that way.

02:12

Caine

Caine: I live at the press club. I’ve found my spiritual home.

02:21

Film Location

Maher: The Quiet American tells the tale of jaded English journalist Thomas Fowler, a figure closely based on Greene and his experiences in Indo-China.

02:27

Caine

Super:

Michael Caine

Actor

Caine: I know all the Graham Greene stuff. And I know this book in particular. Really, I met Graham Greene a few times and I’m kind of basing myself on him. Except he was six feet five, I'm only six feet two.

02:40

Film Location

Maher: With the keen eye of a journalist and a former intelligence agent, Greene watched as the French fought vainly to hold onto their prized colony and as a small band of American advisers began to plot their future, ill-fated campaigns.

03:00

Noyce: And action!

03:16

Maher: Seeking refuge from a faltering love affair, Greene also revelled in – as he put it - the measure of danger brought to a visitor with a return ticket out of a war zone.

03:19

Noyce: Greene was very much on the edge. But he was always attracted to danger and death. Everyone was potentially your enemy because no one knew who was on the communist side and no one knew who was on the French side in terms of Vietnamese. Death could strike at any moment -- in a dance hall, in a bordello, in an opium den, and maybe tonight will be your last night so you’d better spend it well.

03:32

Streets of Indo-China

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03:59

Maher: By his own account, Greene spent his nights very well indeed. In the crowded streets of Saigon’s Chinatown, he discovered a balm to soothe his torment. Greene would later write that of the four winters he spent in Indo-China ‘opium has left the happiest memory.

04:05

Vietnamese Temple

Actor: After two pipes I felt a certain drowsiness, after four my mind felt alert and calm – unhappiness and fear became like something dimly remembered which I had thought important once. I, who feel shy at exhibiting the grossness of my French, found myself reciting a poem of Baudelaire to my companion, that beautiful poem of escape, Invitation au Voyage. When I got home that night I experienced for the first time the white night of opium.’

04:29

Streets of Hanoi

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05:04

Maher: Philippe Caron crossed paths with Graham Greene, frequenting many of the same haunts.

05:20

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05:25

Maher: Fifty year ago, as a young man looking for adventure, he came to Indo-China to fight in the war. For his bravery on the battlefield, he was awarded his country’s coveted Legion of Honour.

05:31

Now he’s returned to Saigon to reclaim some of the vestiges of his youth -- to stroll down the old Rue Catinat, where he and Greene once stayed in apartments overlooking the orient’s most fashionable street.

Caron

Caron: Yes, it was very pleasant with very beautiful shops. There were no motor bikes at that time. It was almost entirely French and maybe it was for this British guy like crossing the Channel and going to a small town in France. The Brits always did like this exercise.

05:59

Music

06:26

Maher: As the tropical sun sank over this alluring river port Greene would often retire to the bar of the Continental Hotel. Know to all as the ‘Continental Shelf’, it was here that war correspondents, soldiers and spies gathered to slake their thirsts.

06:36

Continental Hotel

Maher: What did you make of him when you met him – you met him here at the Continental ?

Caron: I was a very shy midshipman and he was already a celebrity and chatting with his friend Lucien Bodard, who was also a war correspondent and very well known. Lucien was doing the show – speaking a lot with wild imagery and Graham was rather silent but drinking as much as Lucien.’

06:55

Hanoi Harbour

Maher: But just outside the graceful confines of the French quarters …. Vietnam was a country at war. From the rooftop of another of Greene’s watering holes - The Majestic – patrons could watch American military equipment being unloaded on the quays down below.

07:29

Caron: They were bringing what we had dearly asked, mainly planes and modern weapons and ammunition and all sorts of supplies like trucks, jeeps and things like that.

07:46

Maher: Later the Americans would send troops as well, hundreds of thousands of them. But back then it was Frenchmen like Philippe who fought and died along these waterways, given up to the clammy mists of war.

08:04

Singing

08:19

Red River delta

Maher: It was here in the Red River delta that Greene came to witness the fighting. A land where cathedrals loom out of the emerald paddy, this was once the cradle of Vietnamese Catholicism.

08:29

In Greene’s day the local bishops wielded the powers of feudal kings. They were part of Vietnam’s unruly political patchwork, making enemies of both the French and the communists.

08:44

Phat Diem cathedral

Here within the gates of the sullen, stone basilica at Phat Diem, Greene once sought refuge to watch combat on the surrounding plains.

08:57

Actor: From the belltower of the cathedral at Phat Diem … I could contemplate a panorama of war that was truly classical, the kind that historians or war correspondents used to describe before the era of the camera … howitzer shells exploded in little clouds, hanging motionless for a moment in the calm air above the plain, as in a painting.

09:09

Archival war footage

Maher: But down on the muddy plains of the delta an ugly, unrelenting struggle was underway. On patrol with Foreign Legionaires, Greene was able to see the war at closer quarters.

09:42

French losses were rising sharply. By 1952, about a thousand officers had been killed – the equivalent of two entire graduating classes from the army academy at Saint-Cyr.

For most it was a lonely death – in the turbid waters of a rice paddy or a jungle thicket, half a world away from the comforts of Paris.

10:15

Caron

Caron: It was a tough one. But the French who were here were not draft people – they were professional, they were Legionaires. And they were darn good. Darn good.

10:24

Maher: Opposing them were disciplined guerrillas – under the charismatic leadership of the nationalist – Ho Chi Minh.

10:43

Men like Luu Huan Tran who still bears the scars of the fierce fighting all those years ago.

Tran

Tran: I was wounded when I was helping to lead a squadron. My men were engaged ion a frontal attack to capture a sub-machine gun. I was throwing a grenade when I got wounded. We were fighting with nothing in our hands – we didn’t even have a gun, only swords – but we triumphed over our enemies we were so strong and powerful. If we are united together, we always win in the end. It doesn’t matter how strong the enemy is.

11:01

Streets of Hanoi

Maher: Tragically the truth of Tran’s words had to be learnt twice over -- first by the French, then by the Americans.

11:52

In 1952 a massive bomb went off in Saigon Square, striking terror into the very heart of the French enclave. In The Quiet American, Greene blames the blast on the Americans and their efforts to create a so-called Third Force -- a force opposed to both the communists and French colonialism.

12:06

The Quiet American film

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12:37

Maher: In the first celluloid version of The Quiet American – filmed on location a mere five years after the bomb went off in the square – the meddling of the Americans is seen through the character of Alden Pyle, a young aid worker whom Fowler suspects is a U.S. intelligence agent. The clash between the idealistic hubris of Pyle’s New World and the cynical Realpolitik of Fowler’s Europe is a constant theme.

[Pyle] ‘Isn’t it possible that there’s a third choice, a Third Force ?

[Man at bar] A Third Force ?

[Pyle] Twenty-two million Vietnamese deciding for themselves how they want to live.

[Fowler] You must remember – for Americans figures have magical meanings. A Third Force. Five Freedoms. Lucky Seven. Two for the price of one.

13:09

Tay Nihn

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13:27

Maher: It was here at Tay Nihn – amid what Greene described as the ‘full Asiatic splendour of a Walt Disney fantasy’ - that the Americans thought, for at time at least, they might create their Third Force. Founded in the 1920s, the Cao Dai sect embraces an exotic cocktail of faiths -- Buddhism, Taoism and Christianity among them. Its clergy includes a Pope, cardinals and female priests, and the great eye of God follows their every movement. Among the sect’s minor saints is none other than the French poet, Victor Hugo. The Cao Dai profess to be a world religion founded on peace. But in Greene’s day the sect had an army of 20,000 men led by a renegade commandant with good anti-communist credentials. His name was General The.

13:40

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The Quiet American film

Maher: In The Quiet American, it is General The – armed with American explosives and support -- who sets off the bombs in Saigon Square.

14:51

[Fowler] ‘You’ve put your General The on the map all right – look at that red colour on the street. There’s your Third Force! And those things being carried by our stretchers there’s your national democracy !

[Pyle] Why don’t you shut up ! For once in your life, why don’t you just shut up and help somebody !

[Fowler] Go home to Phuong and tell her about the heroic dead ! A few dozen less of her country people to worry about !

14:59

Maher: In the end, Pyle’s messianic mission to help save the Vietnamese from the clutches of communism leads to his murder. His death becomes a powerful metaphor for the ultimate failure of U.S. policy in Indo-China. Just like Pyle, America was stumbling blindly into a fight it couldn’t win.

15:23

Noyce

Super:

Philip Noyce

Director

Noyce: Graham Greene was able to describe the fundamental principles of American foreign policy that have existed since 1950 right up to the present day. The question of whether the means are justified by the ends -- in other words whether you are right in doing anything to achieve what you consider to be a goal that is for the good of mankind or the good of another country. Basically whether America should play puppeteer in other people’s business.

15:48

Maher

Maher: In 1955, Graham Greene made his last trip to Indo-China. By then, the French had fled the North and Greene claims to have drunk the last bottle of beer left in Hanoi. Tired, ill, and depressed, he also resorted to a few pipes of his beloved opium to steel himself for an interview with the nationalist leader, Ho Chi Minh, who would soon be engaged in yet another protracted war.

16:36

Archival war footage

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17:00

Maher: 1955 was also the year The Quiet American was published. Then, tragically little was know about the nationalist struggle in Indo-China. But in the United States, Greene’s novel was dismissed as ‘anti-American.’ Had more of the politicians and generals who prosecuted the war read this prophetic book, their eyes might have been opened to the impending nightmare into which their nation was about to descend.

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Credits:

Reporter: Michael Maher

Camera: David Leland

Editor: Stuart Miller

Research: Anna Bracks

17:48