The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (171 page)

Greenaway is a test case in the question as to whether cinema can really be as solitary as art or literature. Or is there not an inevitable, maudlin, melodramatic sense of the crowd as soon as one throws light on a wall?

Greenaway
is
an authentic misanthrope. There is a barely veiled disdain for the pale weakness of human flesh amid the posed swagger of bunting, decor, and food in
The Cook, the Thief…
. And when Greenaway’s camera makes its rapid, sidelong tracking movements from space to space it resembles a rat in the skirting boards, thrilled by human squalor.

Graham Greene
(1904–91), b. Berkhamstead, England
In his written fiction, Graham Greene kept a bleak wariness for what he called “cinemas,” tawdry caves where pictures played. He did not trust their comfort or diversion, any more than he relied on consolation from their neighbors on gray streets, the churches. Both buildings smelled to him of guilt and embalming.

But in life, Greene ignored his own warnings; he loved to make himself available for the dark and its threats. His father, a schoolteacher, once took a group of boys to a Tarzan picture (this in the Elmo Lincoln era), believing the film had anthropological and educational value. When raw fantasy became apparent, the disappointed father left the cinema. But Graham and the boys stayed to see it through.

As a journalist in Nottingham, in the 1920s, Greene escaped afternoon light by seeing whatever the local theatres offered. He preferred to go on his own, because being alone (and hidden) among strangers gazing at the bright sensation was so stimulating: “Cinemas have a peculiar effect.… Is it the concentrated emotion of lots of people? Because it doesn’t work if one’s not alone, for then one’s withdrawn from the general audience and can scoff at the ridiculousness of the picture. It’s all very curious.”

There’s something critically Greene in that: the half-hypnotized, half-removed admission of a creepy solitude in which things pass solemnly when they would be fatuous in company. The mood is furtive but intellectual, a little prurient but dreamily aloof—it is like watching oneself watching, a mixture of rapt voyeurism and smiling distaste.

“When I describe a scene,” he told Marie-Françoise Allain, “I capture it with the moving eye of the cine-camera rather than with the photographer’s eye—which leaves it frozen. In this precise domain I think that the cinema has influenced me. Authors like Walter Scott and the Victorians were influenced by paintings and constructed their backgrounds as though they were static and came from the hands of a Constable. I work with the camera, following my characters and their movements. So the landscape moves. When I turn my head and look at the harbor, my head moves, the houses move, the boats move, don’t they?”

You can call this cinematic or voyeuristic; the human itch existed before the machinery, but it gained nerve or insolence when film industrialized the shy glance:

Mr. Tench went out to look for his ether cylinder, into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust. A few vultures looked down from the roof with shabby indifference: he wasn’t carrion yet.

—The opening of
The Power and the Glory
, 1940

Three clear shots—but, in a movie, how could the vultures be made the watchers, and how could their verdict then become Tench’s point of view? The narrative is so much more slippery than the celluloid.

“If somebody asked you what your deepest sexual experience had been what would you say?”

I knew the answer to that, “Lying in bed early one morning and watching a woman in a red dressing-gown brush her hair.”

—Pyle and Fowler in
The Quiet American
, 1955

But if you film that, do you cut away to the woman recollected, making an epiphany of her, so that you have to find a right actress and a proper dressing gown? Or do you just hold on Fowler’s fallen face speaking the line? Somehow the book eludes visibility just as it evokes it, for we envisage Fowler and the woman—who can be any woman—as we read, and even wonder if her preciousness is fabricated (to impress Pyle? to impress Fowler?).

He looks out of the window of the swaying, rising car at the figures diminishing below them with what looks like genuine commiseration. Very slowly, on one side of them, the city sinks: very slowly on the other, the great cross girders of the wheel rise into sight. As the horizon slides away, the Danube becomes visible, and the piers of the Reichsbrucke lift above the houses.

—From the screenplay
for
The Third Man
(48) This describes the Great Wheel sequence, just before Harry Lime speaks of dots and lives down below at £20,000 a dot, “free of income tax, old man.” But the scene on screen cannot capture the airy lurch of the cabin—the true nausea of Lime’s presence—because Carol Reed had to shoot the cabin in the studio in front of process work.

I watched him striding off on his overgrown legs after the girl. He caught her up and they walked side by side. I don’t think he said a word to her: it was like the end of a story except that before they turned out of my sight her hand was through his arm—which is how a story usually begins.

—The close to the story
“The Third Man”

The story was written before the script but not published until 1950, and the ending is a mercy not permitted in the film, where Anna/Valli just walks away, ignoring Holly Martins and the camera. It was an ending over which Greene and Carol Reed argued. Reed felt the audience would find a yielding Anna cynical and opportunistic. Greene “held the view that an entertainment of this kind was too light an affair to carry the weight of an unhappy ending.”

So Greene’s standing as a “natural” or skilled screenwriter does not confine him as just a “cinematic novelist.” Still, film let him insinuate himself into a level of intimacy, or secrecy, that is very modern. What helped was a knack of writing that producers and moguls grasped, his instinct for suspense, his own worldly charm, and his interest in danger—this was a bookworm who found friendship with Alexander Korda (and some other dictators).

It was possible to see Greene as a respectable Englishman. That’s how François Truffaut used him, credited as Henry Graham, in
Day for Night
, as a London insurance man sent to advise a troubled project. Greene’s father would rise to be headmaster of a minor public school. Graham himself went to Balliol College, Oxford, and worked for the
Times
, for British intelligence in Sierra Leone (the site of
The Heart of the Matter
) and in publishing. He also maintained a steady flow of writing—novels, nonfiction, essays, scripts, and three produced stage plays. He was a Companion of Honour and he held the Order of Merit.

All that fits with the Greene of photographs—tall, straight, eyes so pale they seemed nearly empty, a little withdrawn and wry, unsmiling yet not angry, and notably free from excess or passion. It was a tidy, wrapped face; and it changed little in sixty years. “I have no talent,” he once said, like a bank manager (the young man’s profession in
Travels with My Aunt
), “it’s just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.” There was a quality of silence in the face, something evident, say, in the face of Ralph Richardson’s Baines in
The Fallen Idol
. It’s the hush of despairing hope, or desperate gambling.

He had tried several kinds of suicide and the spin of Russian roulette as a youth. He traveled in perilous places—Mexico in the thirties, Indochina in the fifties, Haiti from time to time, the hot spots of Africa and London in the Blitz. A friend to bosses, he had been a Communist and he could be fired by causes even as late as
J’Accuse
, in 1982, when he was more crank than Zola, blazing away at corruption on the Côte d’Azur. He tried opium and whores in matter-of-fact ways. He was sued by lawyers on behalf of Shirley Temple for calling her “a totsy.” There was a recklessness to him; it was like a shy man doing something flagrant out of a need to be shocking, or exposed.

He had taken up film reviewing in 1935 for the
Spectator
. In retrospect, he claimed it was a drunken idea formed “after the dangerous third Martini.” But he had real money problems in the thirties, and he needed a means of distancing himself from the dark. It was not until 1972, when his reviews were published as
The Pleasure Dome
, that Greene admitted the element of fun:

Four and a half years of watching films several times a week.… I can hardly believe in that life of the distant thirties now, a way of life which I adopted quite voluntarily from a sense of fun. More than four hundred films—and I suppose there would have been many more if I had not suffered during the same period from other obsessions—four novels had to be written, not to speak of a travel book which took me away for months to Mexico, far from the Pleasure-Dome—all those Empires and Odeons of a luxury and a bizarre taste we shall never see again.”

The reviews are good reading still because of Greene’s range and the bite of his observations. The films were a trigger for life, or for his novelizing alchemy. For instance, he fell with delight on Wesley Ruggles’s comedy
True Confessions
just because it had pierced the screen’s “lifelike” armor and found that unruly vibrancy we call the ordinary. Whereupon he offered a thought worthy of one of his own characters, aghast at the way the world was wearing out:

I advise a quick visit [to
True Confessions
]: the public, I think, found it oddly shocking, for the middlebrow screen is more and more dictating how people ought to behave—even at a deathbed. I remember lying in bed a few years ago in a public ward listening with fascinated horror to a mother crying over her child who had died suddenly and unexpectedly after a minor operation. You couldn’t question the appalling grief, but the words she used … they were the cheapest, the most improbable, the most untrue … one had heard them on a dozen British screens. Even the father felt embarrassed standing there beside her in the open ward, avoiding every eye.

That mix of horror and the hideous reminds one how regularly Greene held back from praising Alfred Hitchcock. To which one should add their having been born only five years and twenty-five miles apart, with the saving gap of having a greengrocer and a teacher for fathers.

Perhaps it takes one misanthropic voyeur to know (and cut) another. Even in 1972, after he might have seen the later, richer, Greener stages of Hitch’s inner journey, Greene held to opinions based on the English films of the thirties. He had detected then “an inadequate sense of reality.… His films consist of a series of small, ‘amusing’ melodramatic situations: the murderer’s button dropped on the baccarat board; the strangled organist’s hands prolonging the notes in the empty church … very perfunctorily he builds up to those tricky situations (paying no attention on the way to inconsistencies) and then drops them: they mean nothing; they lead to nothing.”

Greene’s claim is warranted. Yet the trickiness in Hitchcock, the indifference to reality, and even the disdain, can be found in Greene, too. To say nothing of the vague outlines of Catholic consequences for noir setups. In both bodies of work, we can feel how dread, desire, and solitariness have separated the authors from reality. Both men had difficulty expressing their strong feelings naturally; in both cases that left a disconcerting edge of judgmental hostility, a way of sneering at treasured things. And in both artists we feel the outcast sadness of lifelong watchers. Their work could suddenly go taut with religious suspense: this happens as the wife declines in
The Wrong Man
, and in
The End of the Affair
, one of Greene’s most harrowing novels, love is abandoned in return for a granted prayer.

Greene liked to sound lofty (perhaps it made God feel a better bet), but he was practical when he had to be. In 1937 he wrote a short piece, “Film Lunch,” about being at an MGM press junket and having to listen to Louis B. Mayer. The writing is blurry—half tight on Metro liquor, half dozing through Mayer’s windy speech—but the impressionistic scanning of the crowd picks out the writers who “lean back and dream of the hundred pounds a week—and all that’s asked in return, the dried imagination and the dead pen.”

Greene was estimating a career. His 101-page treatment “The Tenth Man” was bought and shelved by MGM. In 1936 he reviewed Carol Reed’s
Laburnum Grove
favorably, but said, “Mr. Reed, when he gets the right scripts, will prove far more than efficient.” But he was not just an opportunist; he wanted to be tested and scourged. So he weighed the drama of life in terms of betrayal. Sooner or later, we all fail there. In his novels, Greene is a vulture hovering above the stricken first-person narrative, or those numb third-person autopsies on the central souls. As
A Burnt-Out Case
begins: “The cabin-passenger wrote in his diary a parody of Descartes: ‘I feel discomfort, therefore I am alive!’ ”

Film could not hold on to that nagging “I” voice.
The Third Man
does begin with a narrator—“I never knew the old Vienna before the war …”—and it is actually Carol Reed speaking the lines in the British version. But that voice and its vantage never return, and so we lose the chance of a cool, pitiless amusement that watches Holly and Harry do their brief dance to the zither. Whereas in the novella, or treatment, which Greene wrote first (and which sold the venture to Korda and Selznick), the whole thing is narrated in that mood by Calloway, the military policeman played by Trevor Howard.

He half imagines and half inherits from Holly the talk between Lime and Martins in the Wheel. The movie would be clumsy like that. Still, Calloway’s fatalistic point of view is what pins down Lime’s wickedness—the evil that is magicked away on screen. Maybe that ugliness would have stuck if Noël Coward had played the part—that was an early thought. But Orson Welles was so begging to be liked. The film does not quite cheat on Greene. But Lime’s limelight charm joins with the stealthy allure of evil on the screen—when watched from the safety or the nullity of the dark. Voyeurs can’t be judges.