Customer Reviews

A Thinker's Damn : Audie Murphy, Vietnam, and the Making of The Quiet American

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What I like most about this book is that it takes a few months from 1957 on a film location and tells how it feels to be there. The movie was not great, and it was forgotten soon enough. Yet, the atmosphere of film making and the camaraderie of the crew and cast is just a wonderful experience. Yes, they had some terrible times, with ego clashing and scandals covered up, but it is such a nostalgic little story, reading like a novel. All the people in the story, Audie Murphy and Michael Redgrave, mostly are fascinating, and how nice to have a special look at them. I truly enjoyed this armchair escape to another time and another place. Thanks!

The author spares no one and writes without malice, nor affection. No scholarly treatise here but a story taking the reader to the locations. It is such a fine work...The author took evasions and admissions and given sundry reports and wove them into a powerful rendering of what was a tragic film disaster..showing it in all its inevitable choices for failure.. Everyone was treated with care and shown as they were.. This will be a book long treasured by film buffs for its frankness and honest appraisals. The photo sections are wonderful for their range and depicted not only how people worked, but what they were interested in while there..a collection of smiles bravely facing a fiasco. It's one hell of a book..

I'm old enough (born 1960) to remember both Audie Murphy as the shoot 'em up Cowboy of TV Saturday afternoon movies and the mess of American military involvement in Viet Nam, so I found Dr Russo's book quite an interesting and satisfying read. What would the Americans find in VN few years after this movie was made? This book lets the reader know. What was Audie the celebrity like as a person? The details of his role (no pun intended) in the overall making of the motion picture The Quiet American as presented in the book answers that question, with gusto! I agree with the poster who said parts of this book read like a novel, the logistics and headaches encountered by director Joseph Mankiewicz in his almost Quixotic quest to do the picture on location, quite a story. Finally, there is also intentional unresolved drama of what might have been. What might have been for Audie Murphy's career if his attempt at expanding his range as an actor hadnt bombed so badly at the box office.

I have an interest in war, Japanese and Asian affairs. Amazon recommended The Quiet American with Michael Caine. Somewhat a Caine fan, I ordered it and liked it for what it implied about early US involvement in Vietnam. Amazon then recommended the dvd version with Audie Murphy and Michael Redgrave which I tried. That was different. What was going on? What had Graham Greene really written? Ordered and read new Penguin edition. Both film versions took liberties. Why? Amazon suggested A Thinker's Damn by Willima Russo, which finally sorted out for me why the Murphy/Redgrave version differed from the Greene book. Russo also filled in a huge number of additional details and insights about this first film version. The two dvds and the two books provide a very good look at book to film adaptations, and three people's impressions about US policy in early Vietnam. I wonder if Russo has written about the Michael Caine version; it is the one I prefer, even though I am a fan of Michael Redgrave who portrays Fowler in the early film. A good number of photographs illustrate this book.

The Quiet American is quiet no more! Russo covers--and uncovers--a lot of ground (some where bodies are buried!) in this detailed account of the making of the Quiet American. First, he paints a gripping picture of life and work in SE Asia in the period that's the calm before the storm. He breaths new life into the fading reputations of director and stars--especially the gorgeous but miscast leading lady. By all appearances well-researched, this history is peppered with intriguing nuggets of show-biz gossip. An interesting hybrid of scholarly and fan-mag writing. Highly recommended for film buffs and Murphians.

This book has info about Audie that is not anywhere else. The author interviewed people close to Audie who never have talked about him before for publication. The movie The Quiet American was a special project for him, according to his best friend Willard Willingham. He soon hated doing it because Vietnam, even in 1957, was not a pleasant place before the war. This book reads like a novel but is all true. If you really want insights into Audie Murphy, you must read this book. Despite all that happened, he knew what he had to do. He was not just an actor. He was a hero--and in the Quiet American, he played the part to perfection. There is another remake of the movie now filmed, but nothing can top the original.

I have read a few movie making books, but this book is a revelation about how many things can go wrong during production, how stuff like the flu, misplaced permits, even inoculations, could cause a movie to flop. Russo makes us feel how all these actors and crew worked so hard--knowing it was getting worse every day and the movie itself would not be what they wanted. I just loved this book to find out about Vanessa Redgrave's father and what Saigon was like before American soldiers changed it forever.

What I like most about this book is that it takes a few months from 1957 on a film location and tells how it feels to be there. The movie was not great, and it was forgotten soon enough. Yet, the atmosphere of film making and the camaraderie of the crew and cast is just a wonderful experience. Yes, they had some terrible times, with ego clashing and scandals covered up, but it is such a nostalgic little story, reading like a novel. All the people in the story, Audie Murphy and Michael Redgrave, mostly are fascinating, and how nice to have a special look at them. I truly enjoyed this armchair escape to another time and another place. Thanks!

This really is a marvelous book--full of all the details and asides that you don't get to read elsewhere. I found it amusing as well as informative. The author, Dr. Russo, clearly knows his subject--and shares his knowledge in a very entertaining way.