In praise of a stinker: why bad films can be good for us

After 10 weeks devoted to movies because of their quality, let us turn to two pictures – both based on the novel The Quiet American – one of which is a stinker, while one has yet to open. For those who may not know, The Quiet American is by Graham Greene, published in 1955, and set in a land called Indo-China in approximately 1952. That is Indo-China (or Vietnam) a year or so before Dien Bien Phu, the catastrophic defeat of the French colonial army by forces led by the Viet Minh rebels.

The novel is narrated by an Englishman, Fowler, Saigon correspondent for The Times. He is very Greene, middle-aged, disillusioned, with a Catholic wife in London unlikely to divorce him, but living in perilous serenity with a Saigon beauty, Phuong. Then Pyle comes along, the quiet American. He seems to be a mid-level official with an American aid mission. But he proves to be an agent trying to build a right-wing military coup in Indo-China. As if that interference were not enough, he falls in love with Phuong, and proposes to marry her.

I won't say how it ends since you may yet have the pleasure of reading Greene's short novel. Over the years, I've read it a lot and I marvel that people don't try to film it every other year. The setting is exotic, beautiful and lethal. You have military action, roads unsafe at night, terrorist bombs. The love triangle is poignant and sexy and Fowler's narrative seems – as is often the case with Greene – like a man watching a movie about his own life.

In addition, in 1955, Graham Greene had a great record supplying material for the movies; the previous 10 years had seen the release of Brighton Rock (1947), The Fallen Idol (1948), The Third Man (1949), The Heart of the Matter (1953) and The End of the Affair (1955). The only surprise, a few years later, was that Hollywood had elected to make the movie. For the novel – quite rightly – had been received as anti-American in its view of that country's well-meaning, but disastrous intrusion in other countries' affairs. Today – and this is a reason for re-reading the novel (apart from delight in Greene's dry tea prose) – it looks like a treatment for the thing called Vietnam.

That movie, released in 1958, offered some comfort for it was to be written and directed by Joseph L Mankiewicz who had a reputation for superior intelligence and talk (A Letter to Three Wives, All About Eve, The Barefoot Contessa). But Mankiewicz softened the ending, he made a more sympathetic work for American interests, and he cast Audie Murphy as Pyle.

Hardly known today, Murphy was a baby-faced Texan, a war hero and the actor in B-level cowboy pictures. He was hopelessly adrift with Greene's dialogue and could not help but clash with Michael Redgrave's fine Fowler.

Greene condemned that picture. Critics abused it. Audiences avoided it.

And it's hard to think that anyone contemplating American policy in Vietnam gave it a second thought. You can see that film again in a National Film Theatre revival, and it may whet your appetite for the remake – coming soon, though it has been delayed by box-office anxiety – written by Christopher Hampton, directed by Australian Philip Noyce, with Michael Caine as Fowler and Brendan Fraser as Pyle.

Fraser is intriguing casting for he is often an amiable chump. And that's a big part of Greene's Pyle – he's likeable in that he is hampered by an unworldly candor; he means very well; he does want to make the world as safe as American suburbia; and he's so shallow as to be revolting. In America, still, that type is not uncommon. Most television newscasters would fit the bill, and I suspect that, with a bit of dash, Al Gore could play Pyle quite nicely. But how rarely actors in American films let themselves seem dumb. The constant undertone – and the huge lie – in American screen presence is that way of seeming aware of everything, shrewdly calculating and always right. It's there from Clint Eastwood to John Wayne.

So we're not used to seeing people like Pyle, or to realising soon enough that their innocent good intentions are more dangerous than malice. At that point, I suppose, one ought to admit that the idea behind The Quiet American – that idiots are resolved to save the world, whether it likes it or not – is just as current as it was in 1955 or 1968. There are Pyles even now plotting the mad tidiness of the "taking out" of Iraq. And there is an even greater gulf between the mindset of Americana and the stoicism of countries like Indo-China than ever. So good films are all very well. But there are times when we need to study bad films hard, before we re-enact them.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk