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Graham Greene: Quiet American
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Greene's largest film success came with the 1990 production of Dances with Wolves; the role of Kicking Bird, a Lakota holy man who befriends Kevin Costner, brought Greene an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor in 1991. And Greene's personal life moved forward at the same time. While shooting Dances with Wolves, he married Hilary Blackmore, a Toronto stage manager. As his film career took off, Greene continued his theater work, playing "a toothless, beer-guzzling Indian buffoon" in an all-native cast of Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing. Television ... came into the picture in 1990 when Greene played a Navajo lawyer in "L.A. Law," and Leonard, a Native American shaman, on the series "Northern Exposure."
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Compared to the anti-Americanism now sweeping through Europe, Greene's anti-Americanism, even at its most scathing, is relatively mild—and tellingly different in kind. In fact, the film version of The Quiet American inadvertently reveals just how much European anti-Americanism has changed over the last 50 years. In the film, there is a vivid scene, after the explosion in the square, when Fowler is startled to see Pyle speaking fluent Vietnamese, barking orders at a policeman. He suddenly realizes that the man he had thought of as ignorant was actually in complete command of the situation all along. Within seconds Pyle is transformed into a ruthless CIA mastermind—whereas in Greene's version, he remains a bumbling and misguided figure who looks like he is going to faint when he sees the carnage.
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Greene took his first acting role (a Native American) in 1974 as part of the now-defunct Toronto theater company, Ne'er-Do-Well Thespians. In 1980 he played a Native American alcoholic in The Crackwalker by Judith Thompson, and in the 1982 theater production of Jessica, co-authored by Linda Griffiths, he played the role of The Crow. In the 1980s Greene worked with the Theatre Passe Muraille, acting in an "irreverent set of plays, The History of the Village of the Small Huts." When not acting, he welded sets and worked lights.
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Greene lived in at least two places on the Rue Catinat and chose a third as the model for Fowler's apartment in The Quiet American. He didn't need to go far to find Fowler's place. It is on the next corner in from the Majestic. A picture in Norman Sherry's biography The Life of Graham Greene shows this building in pretty sorry shape, but now it is The Grand Hotel, a spotless edifice, more cream stucco and white marble punctuated with dark mahogany counters and liveried attendants. A little farther up the Rue Catinat is the Palais Cafe, where Fowler played quatre cent vingt-et-un with lieutenant Vigot of the Surete. This bar too has been renovated, but it is somewhat darker and livelier at night than the sedate hotels down the street.
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It is in this necessary action that Greene's characters achieve breadth and full humanity. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," Thoreau said, challenging the common man to think beyond quotidian existence. Greene's works are written for and about such men –- his novels offer temporary relief for the individual's existential anguish by imagining what an ordinary player might look like on an extraordinary stage. Yet in the end his characters return comfortably to their humble lives, disinterested in greatness. For Greene, that is what makes them most extraordinary.
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In the early '50s, Greene wrote, "I don't consider myself anti-American any more than I consider myself anti-Romanian or anti-Italian." And in fact Greene's exquisite condescension toward America is tinged, at every turn, with a kind of grudging appreciation. And as a result, the book is filled with quicksilver turns of mood; it tears Pyle down, reduces him to rubble, and then builds him up a moment later into a fairly admirable individual. Pyle is responsible for an explosion that kills women and children in a busy square but ... for saving Fowler's life, dragging him wounded through a field under Vietminh fire. Though the book's affection for America—its energy, its innocence, its belief in changing the rotting world—is couched in fierce criticism, the novel presents a much richer and more nuanced view of Americans abroad than it has been given credit for.
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