Cinema: New Picture, Feb. 10, 1958

The Quiet American (Figaro; United Artists). "Innocence," wrote Graham Greene in the novel from which this film is somewhat speciously taken, "is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm." The leper of modern history, as Greene sees him, is the American—he of the "young and unused face" who has made "a profession of friendship, as though it were law or medicine," and who goes about the world infecting whole continents with the botch of good will. On one level the book is a passionate editorial against...

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