lover at the beginning of the novel, is a beautiful young Vietnamese woman who stays with him for security and protection, and leaves him for the same reason. She is considered by Fowler as a lover to be taken for granted and by Pyle as someone to be protected. Pyle's desire for Phuong was largely interpreted by critics to parallel his desire for a non-Americanised South Vietnam. Her character is never fully developed or revealed. She is never able to show her emotions, as her older sister makes decisions for her. She is named after, but not based on, a Vietnamese friend of Greene's. Vigot, a French inspector at the Sûreté, investigates Pyle's death. He is a man anguished between doing his duty (pursuing Pyle's death and questioning Fowler) and doing what is best for the country (letting the matter be unsolved). He and Fowler are oddly akin in some ways, both faintly cynical and weary of the world; hence their discussion of Blaise Pascal. But they are divided by the differences of their faith: Vigot is a Roman Catholic and Fowler an atheist. Literary significance and reception The novel was popular in England and over the years has achieved notable status, being adapted into films in 1958 and most recently in 2002 by Miramax, featuring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser and earning the former a Best Actor nomination. However, after its publication in the United States in 1956, the novel was widely condemned as anti-American. It was criticised by The New Yorker for portraying Americans as murderers, largely based on one scene in which a bomb explodes in a crowd of people. According to critic Philip Stratford, "American readers were incensed, perhaps not so much because of the biased portrait of obtuse and destructive American innocence and idealism in Alden Pyle, but because in this case it was drawn with such acid pleasure by a middle-class English snob like Thomas Fowler whom they were all too ready to identify with Greene himself". The title of a 1958 book, The Ugly American, was a play on Greene's title; however, authors Eugene Burdick and William Lederer thoroughly misunderstood the novel as their book argued that the American diplomatic corps needed to be more modern, technically proficient, and friendly in assisting Third World countries—some of the exact qualities that blinded Alden Pyle. French journalist Jean-Claude Pomonti's 2006 book about South Vietnamese correspondent