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Here are some excerpts of a review of the Quiet American to give you an idea why it would have appealed to John Francois:
When Graham Greene published The Quiet American in 1955, American involvement in Vietnam was limited to (only?) billions of dollars in military aid to France and South Vietnam, and the machinations of the CIA. Yet the book remains ominously prescient of what was to come: twenty years of folly, millions of casualties, and the first military defeat of the United States.
When it came out, The Quiet American was roundly condemned in America, most notably by critic A. J. Liebling, whose New Yorker review was entitled "A Talkative Something-or-Other." Hollywood turned out a film version at the height of America's crusade against Communism, so the screenplay possessed nothing of the book's anti-Americanism and its ambivalence toward the Reds. Not surprisingly, this propaganda film has been forgotten. Calling it "a real piece of political dishonesty," Greene predicted correctly that "the book will survive a few years longer than Mr. Mankiewicz's incoherent picture." As the ugly truths of the Vietnam conflict percolate upward through the miasma of lies upon which it was founded, the The Quiet American is finally getting its due as political prophecy and work of art . . .
The Quiet American begins with the death of the quiet American, an ingenuous CIA operative named Alden Pyle. Vigot, a fatalistic French policeman (he reads Pascal's Pensees to bide the time), thinks that the British journalist Fowler may have had something to do with it. Fowler denies responsibility: "They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved." But Vigot does not over-exert himself: "To speak plainly," he says, "I am not altogether sorry. He [Pyle] was doing a lot of harm." The harm done by Pyle is based upon his belief that "what the East needed was a Third Force" to replace the French and the Viet Minh, then grappling for control. By receiving American support, this third force would bring Liberty, Justice, and the whole gamut of American shibboleths to Vietnam.
According to Fowler, the problem with Pyle's theory is precisely that it is a theory, lifted verbatim from the writings of an ivory-tower academic named York Harding. To Fowler, theory is useless, even dangerous: its neat, optimistic syllogisms can only fail when applied to the gory and tragic contemporary world that Greene records. Fowler sums up this world, called "Greeneland" by Greene's detractors, as Fowler takes in a Hollywood film at a Saigon cinema:
"Errol Flynn, or it may have been Tyrone Power (I don't know how to distinguish them in tights), swung on ropes and leapt from balconies and rode bareback into technicolour dawns. He rescued a girl and killed his enemy and led a charmed life. It was what they call a film for boys, but the sight of Oedipus emerging with his bleeding eyeballs from the palace at Thebes would surely give a better training for life today."
. . . "You and your like are trying to make a war with the help of people who just aren't interested." "They don't want Communism." "They want enough rice," I said. "They don't want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another. They don't want our white skins around telling them what they want." "If Indo-China goes..." "I know the record. Siam goes. Malaya goes. Indonesia goes. What does 'go' mean?...." "They'll be forced to believe what they're told, they won't be allowed to think for themselves." "Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?" "You talk as if the whole country were peasant. What about the educated? Are they going to be happy?" "Oh no," I said, "we've brought them up in our ideas. We've taught them dangerous games, and that's why we're waiting here, hoping we don't get our throats cut. We deserve to have them cut. I wish your friend York was here too."
.... But Fowler's contempt often loses its focus; it becomes contempt for America itself. Granger, the American journalist, is prone to drunkenness and swaggering, and Fowler avoids him like the plague. Other Americans are "big, noisy, boyish." One can only chuckle nervously as Fowler thinks, "I was tired of the whole pack of them with their private stores of Coca-Cola and their portable hospitals and their too wide cars and their not quite latest guns."
... When Fowler confronts Pyle about the bombing, Pyle is barely conscious of the pain he has caused. For Fowler, this is decisive. His indifference cannot last, is false: he is already attached to Phuong, and to the Vietnamese ripped apart by Pyle's bombs. The quiet American must go. A Communist asks for Fowler's help in getting rid of him and says, "Sooner or later one has to take sides. If one is to remain human."
A review of Greene, Graham. The Quiet American, [Viking Critical Library, Penguin Books, New York, 1996].