The 1958 film of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American was a difficult piece of work and a famous commercial failure, but I imagine this particular adaptation will do rather well.

Greene’s 1952 novel was based on his experiences as a correspondent in Indo-China. Set in Saigon, it’s a study of an American aid worker, Pyle (Brendan Fraser), who is optimistic and busy, and a much older Englishman, Fowler, (Michael Caine), a journalist who hates his work (it fills him with a bored disgust) and their mutual love of a young Vietnamese woman. So, Fraser is America, the crusading idealist, and Caine is England, the convictionless neutralist (naturally, a little too much is made of the supposed contemporary relevance of all of this).

Caine is a tremendous sight. His passionate inwardness is utterly haggered and his detachment from other people’s responses very complicated and felt and true. (Perhaps this is what James Bond would turn out like – living in a middling hotel somewhere warm, forgetting to notice his linen is crumpled, making the same pass at the same ex girlfriend, and noting, grimly, that the moon never looked so obscenely large and lemon-coloured back in Marylebone.)

For so much of the film, Caine looks seasick, corpselike and toadish, and no matter how much time Fraser spends being breezy and good and precisely the correct size for an American (big enough to always seem to be crossing the threshold, making an entry, fielding applause) my eye was drawn to nothing but Caine, the most unflinching thing in the film, and more than adequate compensation for its many compromises.