THE British novelist Graham Greene was a connoisseur of human frailty: he savored the bouquet of sin. He was, unlike most of his countrymen, Roman Catholic, and unlike most practitioners of the literary arts, entirely comfortable with the movies. His religious affiliation was well known, to the point where, at the height of his fame, he bristled at being labeled a “Catholic writer.” His relationship to film was pretty visible too; almost all his 25 novels and many of his short stories were turned into movies or television shows (several of them more than once), and for some of the best of them, like Carol Reed’s classic “Third Man” (1949), he was also the screenwriter.
Both his Catholicism and his movie-friendliness are in full cry in John Boulting’s terrific 1947 gangster picture, “Brighton Rock,” which Greene adapted from his own novel and which starts a week’s run at Film Forum in Manhattan on Friday. In some strange way his religion and his skill at telling stories on film seem here to be two faces of the same rare coin. The movie shows, as clearly as anything he ever did, his very Catholic preoccupation with the allure of sin. And it suggests too why filmmaking might have appealed to him so strongly. In what other activity could he so reliably enjoy the dashed hopes, the queasy compromises and the nagging knowledge of failure, which for him were the staples of life in this fallen world?
The hero of “Brighton Rock,” a vicious 17-year-old thug named Pinkie Brown (Richard Attenborough), is a dedicated sinner and a Catholic after Greene’s own dark heart. “These atheists don’t know nothing,” Pinkie says by way of explaining his personal theology to his sweet, devout girlfriend, Rose (Carol Marsh); “ ’Course there’s hell, flames, damnation, torments.” She hopefully adds, “Heaven too Pinkie.” To which he replies, “Maybe,” sounding not at all convinced.
Pinkie is a ruthless, hollow-eyed sociopath who kills without a flicker of remorse; he’s courting innocent Rose only to keep her from giving testimony that could blow his alibi for a murder. What she sees in him is a mystery — or, rather, it would be, in any context other than that of a Graham Greene story, where virtue is by and large uninteresting, and moral weakness, grubby and persistent, is the main attraction, irresistible as the tawdry pleasures of an English seaside resort.
The hard candy called Brighton rock serves Greene as a handy metaphor for original sin: “Bite all the way down,” one character says, “and it still says Brighton.” That’s Pinkie — no matter how far down you look into his adolescent soul, there’s still something stubbornly evil there, some old, ineradicable corruption.
It’s worth noting that Greene’s participation in the making of the film carries at least a faint whiff of corruption too. Seven years earlier, near the end of a stint as the film critic of The Spectator, he had cheekily reviewed a movie called “21 Days,” on which he was himself one of the credited writers. He panned it, concluding with these ringing words: “Let one guilty man, at any rate, stand in the dock, swearing never, never to do it again.”
So in helping bring “Brighton Rock” — one of his favorites among his books — to the screen he was breaking an oath. And he compounded the sin by softening the story’s memorably cruel ending. He appears to have had no compunction about either his perjury or the necessity of doing a little violence to his own novel. Greene compromised gladly and seemed in later years almost to relish the cynical professionalism with which he had done the dirty work of turning literature into film.
In his next crack at screenwriting, Reed’s elegant and piercing “Fallen Idol” (1948), Greene violated his own published writing — in this case, a short story called “The Basement Room” — even more shamelessly: he transformed the tale of a lonely boy who sees a murder committed by his best friend, the family butler, into the story of a child who mistakes an accident for a crime. In Greeneland this qualifies as wishful thinking. And although the obvious intent of the change is to make the butler (beautifully played by Ralph Richardson) more sympathetic, the effect is to render the boy, who imagines the worst of his friend, slightly more sinister.
The boy’s willingness to believe that a kind man can be a murderer, however, makes him a more Greenelike character than the hero of “The Third Man,” an American writer of pulp westerns named Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), who takes an ungodly long time to come to the realization that his old college chum Harry Lime (Orson Welles) is a monster. “The Third Man” is the most famous of the three happy collaborations between Greene and Reed (the sprightly 1959 black comedy “Our Man in Havana” is the other) and the one that reveals most starkly the author’s virtues and vices, his passions and deepest prejudices.
Greene knew, better than most novelists of his high-literary stature, how to construct a thriller plot, how to deploy mystery, suspense, a pervasive sense of dread, and he knew too that the best villains, like Harry Lime, are charmers: glib marketers of evil. What Greene was temperamentally unable to do, though, was create a convincing innocent; his conception of innocence almost invariably took the form of a bumbling, foolish, irritatingly naïve Yank, like Holly Martins, who is, it seems, inherently incapable of understanding the ruined and desperate Old World of postwar Vienna.
Or like Alden Pyle, the title character of Greene’s 1955 Vietnam-set novel “The Quiet American,” whose naïveté is an act but whose idealism — you might call it a more active form of innocence — is, in Greene’s view, contemptible. He was generally tolerant of the movies’ penchant for altering his work, even when he hadn’t made the changes himself; he had no objection, for instance, to the elimination of the hero’s suicide at the end of George More O’Ferrall’s fine 1953 adaptation of “The Heart of the Matter.” But for the last 30-plus years of his life (he died in 1991) he railed against Joseph P. Mankiewicz, who brought “The Quiet American” to the screen in 1957 and turned Greene’s dangerous idealist into a sympathetic one.
That was unpardonable. (It’s a lucky thing Greene wasn’t a priest; you’d never get absolution.) Surprisingly, though, Mankiewicz’s “Quiet American” is, despite its infidelity to its source, a good movie; while it flips the novel’s politics, it actually goes further than Greene did in exploring the limitations of a certain kind of European weltschmerz, here embodied by a jaded, middle-aged British reporter played with perfectly judged ambiguity by a gangling and weary looking Michael Redgrave.
One of the great advantages of Greene’s writing, in dramatic terms, is the opportunities it provides for a particular kind of subtle, sad-eyed British actor: Redgrave here, Trevor Howard in “The Third Man” and “The Heart of the Matter,” Michael Caine in Philip Noyce’s 2002 remake of “The Quiet American” (which is much more faithful to the novel), Ralph Fiennes in Neil Jordan’s 1999 “End of the Affair” (also a remake, of a 1955 film in which Mr. Fiennes’s role, of a cynical, adulterous English novelist, was played by the wholesome American star Van Johnson).
What’s hard to miss, when you’re looking at films written by or based on stories by Greene, is how resilient these tales are, how powerful they can be even when they’re utterly betraying their author’s intentions. It’s fitting, in a way. His fiction is almost always about betrayals of some kind: infidelities, broken promises, treacheries large and small. And movies are a treacherous art. Greene, in love with corruption, understood them very well. Film is exciting, and impure in ways that obviously thrilled him to the depths of his soul. The movies are not innocent. That’s why he loved them like sin.
Da The New York Times, 14 giugno 2009
