Greene's easy pieces
G. Cabrera Infante
MORNINGS IN THE DARK edited by David Parkinson
Carcanet, f29.95, pp. 738
There are critics who are famous, others are merely notorious. Kenneth Tynan man- aged to be both. Graham Greene was never famous as a film critic. Fame came to him with his novels, sometimes made into films. But he became a notorious reviewer, with the lawsuit filed against him by 20th Century Fox and, lo and behold, Shirley Temple.
He apparently had an obsession with the little artist and in a film magazine called Night and Day (for which everything became darkest night after the trial) Greene had libelled the saccharine singing- and-dancing girl by calling her ugly names. In his essay (included in this book) 'Memo- ries of a Film Critic' Greene claimed that his exact words couldn't 'be found here for obvious reasons', but the Times' Law Reports printed them in full after the trial — that Greene lost. Every film reviewer worth his Attic salt knows them by heart. The libellous material contained phrases like 'dimpled depravity', 'dubious coquetry' and even suggested that at the time (Miss Temple was barely nine) she was already an Ur-Lolita. No wonder that it was Greene who first hailed in England Nabokov's novel. It was, unnaturally, the real thing.
As a novelist Greene is some sort of a Catholic version of Somerset Maugham, but his preoccupation with religion is terri- bly boring. I met him in Havana BC (Before Castro) and after, when that very likeable man Carol Reed was shooting Our Man in Havana. In spite of Noel Coward, forwardly funny, and Alec Guinness, bash- fully British, the movie (and the novel before it) is the glorification of one of Batista's cruellest henchmen (and hang- men) enacted by, of all actors, the Ameri- can comedian Ernie Kovacs. This, like the description of young Shirley Temple, was a 'gross outrage'. Greene atoned for his sins by becoming rabidly pro-Castro. In Mornings in the Dark, a collection of his movie reviewing, Greene reads some- times like a Jack of Old Tricks when he Compares Fred Astaire to Mickey Mouse (a mean trick), but he repeats the comparison a few reviews after and it becomes an old hat trick. He wonders, 'What is the critic to write about?' — and of course he is right. There is nothing else to say about a movie, any movie, but 'I like it', 'I don't like it' or 'It is utterly boring'.
Great movie critics are first and foremost great writers. That is the case of James Agee in America. There are other film crit- ics, like Manny Farber, who are bad writers (Farber was a painter by profession) but can give the reader new insights into the state of the art, or like Pauline Kael, for- merly with The New Yorker. Greene is not one of those.
It seemed that with one collection of Greene's film reviews already in the bag (Pleasure Dome: The Collected Film Criti- cism by Graham Greene, 1935-1940, pub- lished in 1980) a second one was hardly needed. But the reader might be wrong at his own expense. What with television being made into our own private cinematheque, the oldies (and the not so oldie) recur every night on that truly magic box. That is why collections of film reviews keep coming back to life to brighten our pop eyes.
In his reviews Greene can be curiously xenophobic, warning the reader about instant takeovers of the British film indus- try by foreigners, especially those of Hun- garian extraction. I say curiously because his best contributions to screenwriting were made as an employee of Alexander Korda, a Hungarian Jew. Converso means a man
who changes religion abruptly. It is a form of religious opportunism.
Greene had dubious preferences as a critic. He preferred a Soviet piece of pro- paganda like We From Kronstadt to Bride of Frankenstein, a British delight made in America and a masterpiece of comic hor- ror. In spite of his ironic jabs and historical punches Greene didn't have the sense of humour that his strict contemporaries Eve- lyn Waugh and Anthony Burgess display on every page.
The 'Introduction' by David Parkinson tries to establish that Greene was 'obsessed with sex'. (The phrase comes from Otto Preminger who certainly was a sex fiend.) Apart from describing poor little Miss Temple as possessed by 'a mature coquetry' and then again saying that she had 'a precocious body as voluptuous in grey flannel as Marlene Dietrich's', there is evidence that the reviewer, as later the novelist, was obsessed not with sex but with politics and death. His masterpiece as a film writer proves it. There is a lot of poli- tics and dying in The Third Man, but no sex, as such, and the little love there is can be called furtive and futile.
Though The Third Man was mainly the work of the most underrated of all major British film directors, Carol Reed (the most overrated is, of course, Thorold Dick- inson), Greene wrote in the introduction to his published script, 'I had my film'. Well, not quite. The idea for it came from
Alexander Korda; the rest was done by Reed, who found the only single element that became essential to the movie, its harbinger in fact: the zither music played by an unknown Hungarian café artist in Vienna. It became a world hit before the film was released. The moving end-shot of Alida Valli, forlorn but determined, walk- ing out of the cemetery and towards the camera, was devised by Reed too — and bitterly opposed by Greene, who had no film sense at all. To prove it, he consistent- ly panned Alfred Hitchcock, the greatest film-maker England has produced, and even refused to sell the rights of Our Man in Havana to Hitchcock in his prime! The most literary lines in The Third Man belong not to Greene but to Orson Welles, who wrote them and then delivered the speech with his customary panache. It became the best parting shot in the history of film.
And yet The Third Man is nevertheless curiously autobiographical. Its apparent hero is the patsy as a writer of 'entertain- ment books'. He has a friend who is a spy for the Russians and a traitor hiding in the Russian Zone. He is a proven scoundrel, but the writer still considers him his friend. He was called Harry Lime but could have been called Kim Philby.
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