Conspiracies

Last night I indulged my affection for Frank Sinatra movies and rented The Naked Runner, a wonderfully typical mid-60s Cold War thriller. In the film, British spies manipulate an American businessman, played by Sinatra, into assassinating an East German agent. It's not a terrific movie, at least not in the scan-and-pan version I saw on VHS that cuts off 40% of the cinemascope image, but the premise is worthy of Patricia Highsmith, and Sinatra's performance is thankfully understated.

Then today I went to see The Quiet American, Michael Caine's last hurrah as a dashing leading man. Though the film concentrates on how American foreign policy in Indo-China (now Vietnam) in the 1950s is eerily echoed today, I picked up on the film's parallels to the Sinatra movie. Each movie has, as its climax, an assassination that the protagonist is manipulated into. Seen through the lens of the Sinatra film, the Caine film clearly focuses on the wrong relationships. Instead of concentrating on the sexual triangle between Caine, Brendan Fraser and Do Thi Hai Yen (who can only be described as "willowy"), I thought the film should have concentrated on the relationship between Caine, who plays a journalist, and his native assistant, a secret Communist sympathizer who manipulates Caine into betraying Fraser. This personal betrayal, not incipient American influence in Indo-China which audiences are all too familiar with, is the story's real linchpin.