The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  … the best film in London … the finest travel film I have seen … explained in an admirably plain commentary. Here is the last medieval State in all its squalor (the flies swarming round the eyes and nostrils as though they were so much exposed meat in a butcher’s shop), its dignity (the white-robed noblemen flowing into the capital followed by their armed retainers, the caged symbolic lions, and the Lion of Judah himself, his dark cramped dignity, his air of a thousand years of breeding), its democratic justice (the little courts by the roadside, on the railway track; the debtor and creditor chained together; the murderer led off to execution by the relatives of the murdered).25

  He consistently praised the documentaries of John Grierson and Basil Wright, but in his ‘Footnotes to the Film’ article he struck out at the documentary pioneer Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran, comparing it unfavourably with Hortobagy, a Hungarian documentary about horses. Man of Aran was a glaring example of ‘arty’ cinema – ‘how affected and wearisome were those figures against the skyline, how meaningless that magnificent photography of storm after storm.’ He was particularly concerned about the truthfulness of the documentary: ‘The inhabitants [of Aran] had to be taught shark-hunting in order to supply Mr Flaherty with a dramatic sequence’, but Hortobagy ‘did … attempt to show life truthfully: those wild herds tossing across the enormous plain … the leaping of the stallions, the foaling of the mares shown with meticulous candour, did leave the impression that we were seeing, as far as was humanly possible, life as it is.’26

  For this reason he was highly critical of the Marquis de la Falaise’s travel film about Indo-China. He much preferred Smythe’s Kamet, a plain statement about the climb of Mount Kamet, and Song of Ceylon, directed by Basil Wright, who was ‘content to accept the limitations of ignorance, of a European mind’. He seriously doubted the Marquis’s claim that his close-ups of tigers were genuine, particularly since one sequence was of a man being attacked by a tiger – ‘the Marquis with eighteenth-century imperturbability must have continued to shoot his film within a few feet of the struggle. How are we to help doubting either his accuracy or his humanity? And the little well-shaven gentleman in shorts and topee emerging from that fever-ridden swamp has all the appearance of a kindly man.’27

  This review appeared on 17 April and on 26 April Greene wrote in his diary: ‘Received a letter (anonymous) from High Wycombe addressed to me as Film Critic at the Spectator. This contained a piece of notepaper covered with human shit. Now my last article – on “Kliou the Tiger” – could have offended no one but the Marquis de la Falaise, the producer.’ Thirty years later, in Paris at a dinner, Graham sat opposite the Marquis and was charmed by his conversation. ‘I longed to ask him the truth, but I was daunted by the furniture.’28

  He objected strongly to foreigners being brought in to make films about Britain. He thought it typical of the British film industry, whose leading showman was Mr Alexander Korda, that M. Clair ‘should be brought to this country to direct a Scottish film full of what must be to him rather incomprehensible jokes about whisky and bagpipes’.29

  Fire Over England was even more ironically treated: ‘Herr Pommer, the German producer, and William K. Howard, the American director, of Mr Korda’s great national Coronation-year picture of Elizabethan England have done one remarkable thing: they have caught the very spirit of an English public school mistress’s vision of history … Miss [Flora] Robson [who played the part of Queen Elizabeth] catches the very accent and manner of an adored headmistress …’ It is not so much Korda who comes in for criticism as A. E. W. Mason, from whose novel the film was made, and the writer of the screenplay, Clemence Dane, author of Will Shakespeare and the woman who supported Greene’s admittedly poor novel, The Name of Action, for the Book Society choice, and also Stamboul Train. Greene is a hard, unswerving man where his ideals and beliefs are concerned. ‘It is not, I am sure, Miss Robson’s fault,’ he writes; ‘she has only too faithfully carried out the suggestions of the script … From neither of these authors [Dane and Mason] do we expect a very penetrating or realistic study of the Queen.’30 And on a nationalist note, though also a creative one, he speaks out about the disturbing influence of foreigners making English films:

  The artist belongs to the cave: he is national: and the men through whom he must transmit his idea, in whose company he must retain the integrity of his conception, are – very frequently – foreign. In what can with technical accuracy be termed an English company you may have an Hungarian producer assisted by an Hungarian art director and an Hungarian scenario editor. Among its directors there may be Frenchmen, Hungarians, Germans, and Americans. The language is strange to them, the ideas are strange: little wonder that the characters are slowly smoothed out of existence, the English corners rubbed away. The public – you may say – has been reached by something, and they’ll be reached again next week and the week after by so many thousand feet of celluloid; they haven’t been reached by an idea: that has died on the way, somewhere in the central-heated office, at a conference, among the foreign accents.31

  William Hazlitt’s comment on the performance of the lecturer Mackintosh could well be applied to Greene’s film reviewing: ‘The havoc was amazing, the desolation was complete.’ But his criticism was consistently brilliant, often cruel, and generally justified. And he did work towards a philosophy of what the film should be. In his article ‘Subjects and Stories’ he stated that what he wanted was a film that reflected Chekhov’s view of what a play should present – ‘life as it is and life as it ought to be’. Only films which come up to this standard will provide poetic cinema and that is the only form worth considering, the only kind of film fulfilling the proper function of the cinema. He condemned the popular playwrights of the day, St John Ervine and Dodie Smith for example, as having no sense of life as it is lived. If they have some dim idea of a better life it is visualised in terms of sexual or financial happiness. This also applied to the popular novelists – Hugh Walpole, Brett Young, J. B. Priestley – ‘representing no more of contemporary life than is to be got out of a holiday snapshot’.

  Writing this essay in the third week of February 1937, Greene turned to the list of films then to be seen in London. He quotes a number of the representative plots, of which one, that of Magnificent Obsession, is not untypical in its absurdity: ‘a woman loses her eyesight when a drunken young plutocrat smashes his car! The young man turns over a new leaf, studies medicine, becomes the greatest eye surgeon of his day in time to cure and marry the girl while both are young.’

  Yet, however absurd these examples of bad films, it was the film which had the most to offer creatively – a vast audience: ‘What a chance there is for the creative artist, one persists in believing, to produce for an audience incomparably greater than all the “popular” novelists combined … a genuinely vulgar art … The novelist may write for a few thousand readers, but the film artist must work for millions. To truly work for the millions, then the art had to be vulgar in the same sense of being popular as a dance tune.’

  Greene is not thinking of stooping down to the masses. In contrast it should be an honour: ‘It should be [the film-maker’s] distinction and pride that he has a public whose needs have never been met since the closing of the theatres by Cromwell.’32

  For Greene, the film executive has it wrong. He thinks of the trivialities of the ‘popular’ play and ‘popular’ novel of a limited middle-class audience, of the tired businessman and the female reader. These are private responses, but ‘a popular response is not the sum of private excitements, but mass feeling, mass excitement, the Wembley roar.’ The Elizabethan stage had provided action which ‘arouses as communal a response as bear-baiting’. The film executive’s caveat, that ‘people want to be taken out of themselves’, is answered by Greene, ‘people are taken out of themselves at Wembley’. Greene’s view was that an excited audience is never depressed and that, ‘if you excite your audience first, you can put over what you will of horror, suffering, truth.’ />
  There was a snag – the Board of Censors forbade any controversial subject on the screen. Yet this was not all bad: ‘We are saved from the merely topical by our absurd censorship.’ And we are driven back to the ‘blood’, the thriller.

  Coming from the middle classes of England Greene is yet determined to reject middle-class recipes: ‘There never has been a school of popular English blood. We have been damned from the start by middle-class virtues, by gentlemen cracksmen and stolen plans and Mr Wu’s. We have to go farther back than this, dive below the polite level, to something nearer to the common life.’

  The first need is to return to a more popular drama, even if it is in the simplest terms of blood on a garage floor (he quotes from Macbeth – ‘There lay Duncan laced in his golden blood’), ‘the scream of cars in flight, all the old excitements at their simplest and most sure-fire, then we can begin – secretly, with low cunning – to develop our poetic drama … Our characters can develop from the level of The Spanish Tragedy towards a subtler, more thoughtful level.’

  Some such development, Greene argues, is shown in the work of the German director Fritz Lang: his thriller The Spy, ‘has no human values at all, only a brilliant eye for the surface of life and the power of physical excitement – but the human, the poetic value has to be introduced by means, not of words – that is the way of the stage’ – but by means of poetic use of imagery and incident. In Greene’s view this is to be found, for example, in the 1936 Russian film We From Kronstadt, and he gives examples of this power to suggest human values by poetic, visual images: a ‘sooty tree drooping on the huge rocky Kronstadt walls above a bench where a sailor and woman embrace, against the dark tide’; ‘the gulls sweeping and coursing above the cliffs where the Red prisoners are lined up for their death by drowning, the camera moving from the heavy rocks round their necks to the movement of the light, white wings’; ‘every poetic image [is] chosen for its contrasting value, to represent peace and normal human values under the heroics and the wartime patriotism.’ ‘The object of the film’, he wrote, ‘should be the translation of thought back into images. America has made the mistake of translating it into action.’33

  So we can say that at least up to August 1936 Greene held high hopes of the value of writing for the cinema. But a year later, when he had written his brilliant article, ‘Film Lunch’, for Night and Day with its clever put-down of Louis B. Mayer, head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Greene was suffering from some disillusionment. Moreover, he had made some enemies among the film magnates by his unrelenting (and acid) comments about all the slop and slush that he was forced to view and judge. Near the end of ‘Film Lunch’ he speaks of the scriptwriter’s job on films as ‘the novelist’s Irish sweep: money for no thought, for the banal situation and the inhuman romance; money for forgetting how people live: money for “Sid-down, won’t yer” and “I love, I love, I love,” endlessly repeated. Inside the voice [of Mayer] goes on “God … I pray …” and the writers, a little stuffed and a little boozed, 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 himself was to be one of those writers who were to serve a hungry screen, and no doubt, like others at the lunch ‘a little stuffed and a little boozed’. He learnt of the situation at first hand.

  *

  Ironically, his fierce criticism of the film world turned its interest to him. As early as 28 January 1936, he wrote to Hugh: ‘I’m getting deep into films, so deep that Grierson sounded me the other day on whether I should be interested in a producing job.’ Perhaps with his tongue (slightly) in his cheek, he added: ‘I hope he is picturing me as the head of the proposed BBC Film Unit. I’m on a kind of advisory committee on television as it is. Altogether I seem to have cut into the racket at the right angle. Last night we were at quite an amusing party given for Lotte Reiniger [German animator, well known for her silhouette cartoons] with a programme of trick films.’34 He was making friends in the film world and friends among the directors he most admired: ‘I’m dining with Basil Wright of the G.P.O. unit on Thursday.’35

  By 9 May Greene was producing Calendar of the Year, and by the third week of May he reported to his brother Hugh: ‘Did I tell you Cavalcanti wants me to do a film with him; Basil Dean proposed a collaboration on a Galsworthy, and I’m producing at the G.P.O.’ He then expresses a desire to escape from writing through the film opportunities: ‘I have hopes of being able to retire from writing altogether.’

  The film Cavalcanti wanted to do with Greene must be Went the Day Well?, based on Greene’s short story, ‘The Lieutenant Died Last’. It was long in appearing, some six years after this letter was written.fn4 The Basil Dean collaboration (Twenty-One Days) was based on Galsworthy’s story ‘The First and Last’, and appeared three years later in 1939. At this time also, he became involved with a story of his own devising made into a film called The Green Cockatoo. In Ways of Escape he recalled how it happened. Perhaps because he had persistently attacked the films made by Alexander Korda, Korda became curious to meet his enemy and asked Greene’s agent to bring him to Denham Film Studios.

  A letter suggests that he visited Korda in May 1936. Cheekily, he writes to his mother, ‘In about a fortnight I hope I’m going to do a tour of the film studios with John Grierson, asking Korda etc. embarrassing questions.’ But that visit was delayed until November, and before the meeting he reviewed (4 September 1936) Korda’s film of H. G. Wells’s story, The Man Who Could Work Miracles. He criticised both Wells and Korda. Greene stressed that in this film ‘a few immortals and great conspiracies are tacked … to the early short story. The result is pretentious and mildly entertaining.’ In asking rhetorically what remains of Mr Wells’s idea, Greene admitted, ‘the answer is muddle, a rather too Wellsian muddle.’36

  He went on: ‘The direction and the production are shocking. That is not Mr Wells’s fault. And it may not be altogether the fault of Mr Lothar Mendes, the director, for the slowness, vulgarity, overemphasis are typical of Mr Korda’s productions.’ He also attacks Korda (but clears Wells) for the deplorable miscasting: ‘Mr Korda, a publicity man of genius, who has not yet revealed a talent for the films, casts his pictures with little regard for anything but gossip paragraphs.’ As for the film, Greene’s last paragraph adds the final insult: ‘sometimes fake poetry, sometimes unsuccessful comedy, sometimes farce, sometimes sociological discussion, without a spark of creative talent or a trace of film ability.’

  H. G. Wells read the review in the Spectator, and Greene wrote breathlessly to his mother: ‘Last night, I had a letter from Wells. He asked me whether I’d have dinner with him. He said he’d liked my notice of The Man Who Could Work Miracles: “But you’ve still got to meet your Korda. We’ll say no more about the damned disgraceful thing. But I’d like to meet you. You’d be good for me.” Rather sweet way to take my review.’ Greene met Wells and also Wells’s mistress, Baroness Budberg, whom Wells loved so deeply, who had been Maxim Gorky’s mistress. When asked recently who was the most important writer he had met, Greene answered without pause, ‘H. G. Wells’.

  Greene did meet Korda in November and he recalled his meeting in Ways of Escape:

  when we were alone he asked if I had any film story in mind. I had none, so I began to improvise a thriller – early morning on Platform 1 at Paddington, the platform empty, except for one man who is waiting for the last train from Wales. From below his raincoat, a trickle of blood forms a pool on the platform.

  ‘Yes? And then?’

  ‘It would take too long to tell you the whole plot – and the idea needs a lot more working out.’37

  So The Green Cockatoo was born and Greene left half an hour later to work for eight weeks on what seemed then an extravagant salary – ‘and the worst and least successful of Korda’s productions thus began.’38 Greene’s letter to his mother about this (18 November 1936) shows his excitement on meeting ‘the great Korda’. His manner is different from the tough, crit
ical, even superior stance of his reviews:

  I thought you’d be amused to hear what had happened with Korda. I went down on Friday and saw the business manager and a very nice Scotch-American Menzies, who is to direct a series of thrillers. I went down again on Saturday and had lunch at the studios (wonderful buildings with stages as big as cathedrals). Then yesterday I went down again with my agent and saw the great Korda and an arrangement was reached. The first day I’d invented a shocker idea for them which they liked immensely and they want if possible to have a character who will run through a whole series. Anyway in three weeks I have to elaborate the idea and turn it in. For this they pay £175 whether they use it or not. If they use it, they employ me on the film for four weeks at £125 a week. At the end of that time they can call on my services for six months at £125 a week. They insisted on tying me up over a further period, so the following year they could then call on my services for six months at £175 a week, and the next year for six months at £225 a week. They can sell me to Hollywood or elsewhere during that time splitting the gain in salary 50-50. These figures sound astronomical, and of course, only £175 is certain, but these further arrangements were their own idea. It’s all very exciting.

  A month later, he is filming at Denham and very happy. The day after Christmas Day 1936, he writes to Hugh: ‘I’m thick in scenario. Medium Shots and Insert Shots and Flash Backs and the rest of the racket. Korda, I’m glad to say, has given up the Robey idea and seems to be leaving us alone. Casting is proving very difficult. Menzies finds lovely people with appallingly tough faces, but when they open their mouths they all have Oxford accents.’

  *

  In the middle of September 1936 Nancy Pearn was still slogging away trying to place Greene in better-paying magazine slots, and her letter about the latest opening needs to be quoted in full:

  Knowing my Nash’s I made sure that the editor saw your most deliciously diverting review of the Beverley Nichols book.fn5 This added to other factors, leads him now to say that he would like to see you soon in Nash’s, and haven’t you some suggestions you would care to put up. Now would you like to meet this editor, and if so I would arrange it straight away. It would be undutiful and unbecoming not to stress the fact that this is far and away the best paying medium for articles which, although they have, of course, to be framed rather differently than for the Reviews, are nevertheless in the main on a fairly serious type of subject.