The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  fn1 Le Prestre de Vauban (15 May 1633–30 March 1707) was the military engineer who revolutionised the art of siegecraft and defensive fortifications. He also invented the socket bayonet and introduced ricochet gunfire.

  fn2 In Greene’s collection, Twenty-One Stories, ‘The Jubilee’ is dated 1936. This should not trouble us. For no obvious reason, Greene often dates his activities and his stories wrongly. He is generally out a year and sometimes two.

  fn3 Philip’s unexpected analogy is based on an experience of Greene’s in Chipping Campden. He noted in his diary on 18 January 1933: ‘13 days of hard frost. Coming up the hill by the Church I saw a funeral breaking up in the churchyard. I had seen it in the village, an old woman, Mrs Greene, was making a very stately exit with a double row of bearers and two cars following. Terrible weather for gravediggers – the ground hard enough for an electric drill for six inches down.’

  fn4 This last item must refer to his receiving the manuscript of R. K. Narayan’s first novel and the beginning of his admiration for, and assistance to, this novelist.

  fn5 Vivien was again pregnant.

  fn6 Hugh and Helga asked Greene whether ‘Graham’ was on offer and he replied that the name would be free because all his children would be called after Saints.

  37

  The Pleasure Dome

  … all those Empires and Odeons of a luxury and extravagance which we shall never see again.

  – GRAHAM GREENE

  GREENE’S LONG FASCINATION with the cinema aroused in him extremes of emotional response and a deeply critical attitude towards films, their makers and those who appeared in them. It also involved him in the process of film-making – adapting work for the screen, producing (Calendar of the Year, May 1936),1 writing scripts, working on sets, meeting the famous of the industry. It also gave him an escape from writing novels and greater success, at that time, than writing fiction. Although he had written to Hugh in January 19362 that there had never been a time when he had written so much (and this applied to the rest of the year also), his success had not been great: England Made Me, a failure; ‘Fanatic Arabia’ abortive; short stories and reviews not bringing in much money. His greatest financial successes had been the films of Stamboul Train and A Gun for Sale. Moreover, through reviewing films he developed an understanding of the technique of the film and serious views on its significance as a popular art form. The more films he reviewed, the more certain he was that the wrong people were making them.

  He began reviewing films in the middle of 1935, he says in Ways of Escape, as a result of circumstances rather similar to those which started him on his journey to Liberia. The idea came at a party, ‘after the dangerous third Martini’, and since he was talking to the Literary Editor of the Spectator, he took the opportunity to point out that the magazine had hitherto neglected the cinema and suggested that he should do something to fill the gap. He anticipated that the reviewing would last two or three weeks and might be fun, but Derek Verschoyle held him in high regard as a book reviewer and as a result he began a four and a half year stint of film reviewing which ended only in March 1940, six months into the Second World War: ‘I can hardly believe in that life of the distant thirties now … How, I find myself wondering, could I possibly have written all those film reviews? And yet I remember opening the envelopes, which contained the gilded cards of invitation for the morning press performances (mornings when I should have been struggling with other work), with a sense of curiosity and anticipation.’3

  His very first review, appearing on 5 July 1935, set the tone of what was to follow. In it he had a go not only at film executives but also at the whole ethos of the modern world. The film was The Bride of Frankenstein, based on ‘Poor harmless Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein’. For him, Mary Shelley’s dream ‘that she was watched by pale, yellow, speculative eyes between the curtains of her bed’, which was the inspiration for her novel, that ‘one genuine moment of horror … vanished long ago, and there is nothing in The Bride of Frankenstein … to scare a child’. Her dream only ‘set in motion a vast machinery of bogus horror, a wilderness of cardboard sets, of mouthing actors, of sound systems and trick shots and yes men.’ The result was ‘not Mrs Shelley’s dream, but the dream of a committee of film executives who wanted to go one better than Mrs Shelley and let Frankenstein create a second monster.’ It was ‘a pompous, badly acted film, full of absurd anachronisms and inconsistencies.’ Furthermore, in his opinion, the modern world was threatened by the ‘bright, slick, stream-lined civilization … the whole tone of a time whose popular art is on the level of The Bride of Frankenstein.’

  He attacked, in his Spectator reviews, in his article in the Fortnightly (April 1936), in his reviews in the short-lived Night and Day (July–December 1937), and in his contribution, ‘Subjects and Stories’, to Charles Davy’s book, Footnotes to the Film (1937), almost every aspect of film-making of the time. Philip French, the film critic, has described his criticism as being ‘among the most ferocious I’ve ever come across’.4 The ‘holy cows’ of the screen came under his scrutiny. In reviewing Anna Karenina, with Greta Garbo playing Anna, he commented that no one in Hollywood knew what to do with Garbo, ‘her awkward ungainly body, her hollow face strong and rough as an Epstein cast’; and, after praising ‘the melancholy grandeur of her voice’, ‘watch her among a crowd of other actresses in the mazurka, she is stiff, awkward, bony, rather grotesque among the graceful bodies, the lovely shoulders.’5 This criticism so disturbed one reader that he sent Greene an anonymous picture postcard with the message, ‘If you are the best critic on films that the Spectator can raise, I am sorry for the Spectator’s readers. Perhaps you are a woman and not a man. Quién sabe. It is as a beautiful woman that men love Greta Garbo. To nearly every man she is a lovely woman – free figure & carriage. You must be abnormal and “Cretin”.’6

  Marlene Dietrich was also criticised: ‘The great abstractions come whistling hoarsely out in Miss Dietrich’s stylized, weary, and monotonous whisper, among the hideous Technicolor flowers, the yellow cratered desert like Gruyère cheese, the beige faces.’7 He had sympathy with Robert Donat who had to act without a partner as: ‘Miss Dietrich never acts. She lends her too beautiful body: she consents to pose: she is the marble motive for heroisms and sacrifices: as for acting – that is merely the word for what goes on all round her: she leaves it to her servants.’8

  Mae West came off better as she had a personality ‘so outrageously suggestive to the middle-aged’ (which Greene was not) that he admitted he was completely uncritical: ‘I enjoy every one of her films [he was reviewing Klondyke Annie] aware all the time, whether the scene be the Bowery, the Klondyke, Texas or a New York drawing-room, of that bowler-hatted brigade gathered invisibly like seraphs about her stout matronly figure.’9 Yet he was somewhat critical in reviewing her next film, Go West, Young Man, when he wrote of ‘the Edwardian bust, the piled peroxided hair, the seductive and reeling motions reminiscent of an overfed python’, and as for the story it is ‘incredibly tedious, as slow and wobbling in its pace as Miss West’s famous walk … seldom have so many feet of film been expended on a mere dirty look’.10 He was unfair to Madeleine Carrol: ‘She has what must be, to all but the most blindly devoted keepers, the less endearing traits of a young elephant … we cannot help wondering whether Mr Dick Powell with his little moustache and his laving hands, has the stamina to withstand her more-than-lifesize embrace. Handsome in a big way, given to intense proboscine whispers, she lends an impression of weight to every action.’11 Jean Harlow’s last film (the famous platinum blonde did not live to see it) received a poor notice – Greene is rarely sentimental: ‘Tough and conscienceless, containing one admirable scene of carnal comedy … Saratoga is one of Miss Harlow’s better films, though there is no sign that her acting would ever have progressed beyond the scope of the restless shoulders and the protuberant breasts: her technique was the gangster’s technique – she toted a breast like a man totes a gun.’12

  F
amous male actors meet with the same fate. Charles Laughton, whom Greene admired and praised, is yet damned for his part in Rembrandt because it gives ‘Charles Laughton a chance to show his remarkable powers as a “ham” actor – the very best ham …’13 Of John Lodge, the principal actor in The Tenth Man (a title which Greene himself used for a novel, lost in the 1940s, and discovered and published in 1985), he wrote in the Spectator at the end of 1936, that he suffered ‘from a kind of lockjaw, an inability to move the tight muscle of his mouth, to do anything but glare with the dumbness and glossiness of an injured seal’, and Herbert Marshall had an ‘Old English sheep dog manner … the damp muzzle of a healthy British dog’.14

  In an article in the Fortnightly (April 1936), ‘The Middle-Brow Film,’ he attacks Alexander Korda (who was later to become a very special friend) because he must only be a great publicist since he had ‘put over so many undistinguished and positively bad films as if they were a succession of masterpieces’. Though having criticised him in this article he was not too severe in reviews. He speaks of ‘the childlike eyes of the great film executives’ and of the many film magnates not being able to think of a serious message – mild enough criticism. Greene also shot down Alfred Hitchcock – his films amuse, they do not excite. They give a momentary impression of great liveliness, that’s all. He’s tricky not imaginative, though he granted that some of Hitchcock’s tricks were good – the scream of the charwoman finding the murdered woman cut to the shriek of the Flying Scotsman rushing North.

  What he found particularly abhorrent was the sensational and blatant advertising publicity, in a word, the ballyhoo:

  Dog, I suppose, ought not to eat dog, otherwise I should be inclined to cast a malicious eye towards my fellow film-reviewers who have gone into such curious Gothic attitudes of reverence before what must be one of the worst films of the year, The Dark Angel, writing of ‘classic tragedy’ and the ‘great’ acting of Miss Merle Oberon. It is the ballyhoo, of course, which has done it: the advance gossip and the advertisements, the crowds outside the cinema on the opening night, the carefully drilled curiosity as to what Mr Sam Goldwyn had done to Miss Oberon’s eyebrows …15

  He had had personal experience of the ‘ballyhoo’. When he landed at Tenerife with his cousin Barbara, on their way to Liberia, the cinema there was showing the film Orient Express which was loosely based on his novel Stamboul Train: ‘The direction’, he wrote in Journey Without Maps, ‘was incompetent, the photography undistinguished, the story sentimental … By what was unchanged I could judge and condemn my own novel: I could see clearly what was cheap and banal enough to fit the cheap banal film.’16 But it was being ‘sold’: ‘Two Youthful Hearts in the Grip of Intrigue. Fleeing from Life. Cheated? Crashing Across Europe. Wheels of Fate.’ The press book stated:

  The real Orient Express runs across Europe from Belgium to Constantinople. Therefore, you will go wrong if you interpret the word ‘Orient’ to indicate something of a Chinese or Japanese nature. There is enough material of other kinds to arrange a lively colourful ballyhoo, as you will see as soon as you turn to the exploitation pages …

  The press book also suggested a ‘date tie-up’ offering a set of three stills – ‘Norman Foster explaining the sex life of a date to Heather Angel,fn1 passing dates to Heather Angel and Heather Angel buying dates from the car window … Every city has high-class food shops which feature fancy packages of dates. Tie-in with one of these for window-displays … have a demonstration of date products, the many uses of dates, etc … Don’t underestimate the value of a real smart window fixed up with date products and the three stills … Buy a package of delicious dates, and take “The Orient Express” for Constantinople, a most thrilling and satisfying evening’s entertainment at the Rialto Theatre.’ And: ‘Do You Know That: Heather Angel’s pet kitten Penang had to have its claws clipped because it insisted on sharpening them on the legs of expensive tables; That the pet economy of Heather Angel is buying washable gloves and laundering them herself.’17 Enough material, as the press book put it, ‘to arrange a lively colourful ballyhoo’.

  He found much to criticise in American films – Love, Country, Ambition – the great fake emotions (Marie Walewska), the concentrated atmosphere of young innocence (Girls’ Dormitory). Reviewing the film version of Parnell’s life he commented that the ‘fictional screen has never really got beyond wish-fulfilment dreams, and the only interest this week is in seeing the kind of wish-fulfilment the big film executives enjoy’18 – Parnell’s adultery with Mrs O’Shea can’t really be revealed: ‘… anything secretive … anything a little bit lecherous in the story has been eliminated. No illegitimate children, no assignations in seaside hotels under assumed names, no furtive vigils at Waterloo Station … how clean a film magnate’s wish-fulfilments are, how virginal and high-minded the tawdry pathetic human past becomes when the Mayers and Goldwyns turn the magic ring.’19 ‘It needs some stamina to be a film reviewer’, he concluded in the Spectator, 14 August 1936, in a review of a Bing Crosby film. Occasionally, he concedes, ‘a film of truth and tragic value gets somehow out of Hollywood and on to the screen. Nobody can explain it – perhaps a stage needs using, all the big executives are in conference over the latest Mamoulian “masterpiece”fn2 – Jehovah is asleep …’20

  A feeling which comes through these reviews is that behind his criticism of American films lies an implicit criticism of American life and standards in general – a suggestion that he was already becoming anti-American. This comes out strongly in his review of The Road Back, a film based on a novel by Remarque about starvation, revolution and family tragedies:

  It’s an awful film, one big Mother’s Day, celebrated by American youth, plump, adolescent faces with breaking sissy voices. Voices which began to break in the trenches – remembering the kid sister or watching a companion die … We’ve lived through a lot in that time, but not through war, revolution, starvation – but through ‘Can you turn me a little so I can see you go down the road?’ and the young fleshy face is turned away from the dying friend to hide the drip of tears … Like Buchmanfn3 boys starved of confession they break out on the moral front – ‘There’s one more battle to be fought. I must find myself.’ And always all the time, the breaking voices, the unformed unlined faces and the well-fed bodies of American youth, clean-limbed prize-cattle mooing into the microphone. They call it an all-star cast and that always means there isn’t a single player of any distinction to be picked out of the herd.

  It might be funny if it wasn’t horrifying. This is America seeing the world in its own image. There is a scene in which the returned soldiers all go back to their school. Sitting in uniform on the benches they are addressed by the Headmaster; they start their lessons again where they left off … what it really emphasizes is the eternal adolescence of the American mind, to which … morality means keeping Mother’s Day and looking after the kid sister’s purity.21

  Greene’s belief in the ‘eternal adolescence’ of Americans must have remained dormant in his mind for twenty years, for surely the quiet American, Pyle, has this specific characteristic in the novel of the same name. Greene’s strong and bitter dislike of certain aspects of American life and culture, which must have stemmed from seeing countless American movies, even colours his impression of Americans on the streets of London: ‘One came daunted out of the cinema and there, strolling up the Haymarket, dressed up in blue uniforms with little forage-caps and medals clinking, were the American Legionaries, arm in arm with women dressed just the same – all guide-books, glasses and military salutes: caps marked Santa Anna and Minnesota: hair – what there was of it – grey, but the same adolescent features, plump, smug, sentimental, ready for the easy tear and the hearty laugh and the fraternity yell. What use in pretending that with these allies it was ever possible to fight for civilization? For Mother’s Day, yes, for anti-vivisection and humanitarianism, the pet dog and the home fire, for the co-ed college and the campus. Civilization would shock them: eyes on the guide book
for safety, they pass it quickly as if it were a nude in a national collection.’22

  The British cinema did not escape whipping either: ‘Nothing, a novice might think, could be easier than to catch reality with a camera, and yet this shy bird evades almost every English director … Bad casting, bad story construction, uncertain editing: these are the three main faults of English films.’ He was reviewing, in February 1937, the British film Sensation. Two months later dealing with Dark Journey he began: ‘Abandon life all you who enter here: the pedestrian unreality of most Denham pictures lies over this spy drama.’ Above all else, Greene wants ‘no tiresome “message”, but a belief in the importance of a human activity truthfully reported’.23

  Yet he does praise. He praises Luise Rainer’s performance in The Good Earth – ‘the stupid stuck-out lips, the scared, uncalculating and humble gaze, convey all the peasant’s fear of hope … the character she presents … carries the film: the awful pathos of the wedding walk … at the heels of the bridegroom she has never seen, the scrabbling in the ditch for the peach stone he has spat out (from it a tree may grow); toiling heavy with child in the fields to save the harvest from the hurricane … in the long drought taking the knife to the ox her husband fears to kill.’

  He notices not only acting ability but also the director’s sharp notion of visual images which will best represent the drought – ‘like clear exact epithets the images stab home: the plough jammed in the rocky soil, the vultures on the kid’s carcase, the dark sullen stare of the starved child.’24

  What Greene did admire was ‘the brilliant eye’ for surface life to be found in documentary films, and he reviewed them while other critics ignored them. In his first review, as well as dealing with The Bride of Frankenstein, he praised a documentary on Abyssinia: