The centre of old Saigon stepped back nearly 50 years yesterday as filming started of an Australian adaptation of Graham Greene's eerie prophecy of the US debacle in Indochina, The Quiet American.
Directed by Phillip Noyce, whose credits include Patriot Games and The Saint, the film is set in early 1950s Vietnam, a country wracked by war as the curtain comes down on French colonial rule.
It tells the story of a doomed love triangle involving a jaded British war correspondent, Fowler, played by Sir Michael Caine, an idealistic American agent, Pyle, played by Brendan Fraser, and a young Vietnamese girl, Phuong, played by local newcomer Hai Yen.
Fraser's character, Alden Pyle, is The Quiet American of the title, a man in the words of Greene's 1955 novel 'determined... to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world' - with disastrous results.
The makers say they are aiming for a far more faithful adaptation of Greene's work than a 1950s Hollywood version, which turned the plot on its head to make Pyle an anti-communist hero.
Scriptwriter Christopher Hampton, an Academy Award winner with Dangerous Liaisons, said he hoped Greene, with whom he worked on an adaptation of his later novel The Honorary Consul - which also starred Caine - would have been somewhat happier with this version of The Quiet American .
But he said the author, who died in 1991, was a notoriously difficult man to please. 'I think he would be slightly happier,' Hampton said. 'But he was not disposed to be terribly happy with any of the adaptations of his books. When I did The Honorary Consul while he was still alive, I tried to be very faithful with that as well, but he wasn't too happy with it.'
He said Greene had been 'outraged' by the original version of The Quiet American by Joseph L Mankiewicz, seeing it as a complete betrayal of the book's message.
'It was turned from an accurate representation of the historical circumstances of the time into an anti-communist tract, brought about, I suppose, by the climate of the time in America, where you couldn't take an objective view,' Hampton said. 'In fact, that's what the novel's all about - the incapability of people to take an objective view.'
Hampton said he believed Greene's work still carried an important message today.'It's always timely to say "Don't interfere in the affairs of other countries".'
The script has clearly struck the right note with the communist authorities in Vietnam, who gave approval on the grounds that 'it condemns the manoeuvres of hostile forces and foreign aggressors against the Vietnamese people'.
They have allowed the film-makers to shut off a key section of a city centre thoroughfare renamed Dong Khoi - or 'Uprising' Street - after Saigon itself became Ho Chi Minh City with the Communist victory in the Vietnam War in 1975, to recreate the colonial-era rue Catinat.
The production team say they have also secured permission to recreate a 1952 bomb attack Greene was to blame on a 'Third Force' - neither colonialist nor communist - that Pyle championed.
The film-makers have succeeded in creating an authentically period feel on the set, with the ubiquitous Japanese motorcycles and cars of today giving way to vintage Peugeots, Citröens, bicycles and three-wheeled 'cyclo' pedal taxis of the colonial era.
And more than 45 years after France's ignominious exit from Indochina, the kepis and khaki of its colonial police force and military again graced the streets of a city once dubbed 'Paris of the East'.
The crew is scheduled to film for five weeks in Vietnam, with shooting also scheduled in Hanoi, the national capital, as well as the towns of Hoi An and Danang.
