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The Graham Greene Film Reader: Reviews, Essays, Interviews & Film Stories
s/t: Reviews, Essays, Interviews & Film Stories
An anthology of reviews, essays, interviews and film stories by this legendary writer.
An anthology of reviews, essays, interviews and film stories by this legendary writer.
- GenresFilm
748 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1993
2 people are currently reading
76 people want to read
About the author
Graham Greene
809 books6,168 followersHenry Graham Greene was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading novelists of the 20th century.
Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a reputation early in his lifetime as a major writer, both of serious Catholic novels, and of thrillers (or "entertainments" as he termed them). He was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. Through 67 years of writing, which included over 25 novels, he explored the conflicting moral and political issues of the modern world. The Power and the Glory won the 1941 Hawthornden Prize and The Heart of the Matter won the 1948 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Best of the James Tait Black. Greene was awarded the 1968 Shakespeare Prize and the 1981 Jerusalem Prize. Several of his stories have been filmed, some more than once, and he collaborated with filmmaker Carol Reed on The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949).
He converted to Catholicism in 1926 after meeting his future wife, Vivienne Dayrell-Browning. Later in life he took to calling himself a "Catholic agnostic". He died in 1991, aged 86, of leukemia, and was buried in Corseaux cemetery in Switzerland. William Golding called Greene "the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety".
Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a reputation early in his lifetime as a major writer, both of serious Catholic novels, and of thrillers (or "entertainments" as he termed them). He was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. Through 67 years of writing, which included over 25 novels, he explored the conflicting moral and political issues of the modern world. The Power and the Glory won the 1941 Hawthornden Prize and The Heart of the Matter won the 1948 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Best of the James Tait Black. Greene was awarded the 1968 Shakespeare Prize and the 1981 Jerusalem Prize. Several of his stories have been filmed, some more than once, and he collaborated with filmmaker Carol Reed on The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949).
He converted to Catholicism in 1926 after meeting his future wife, Vivienne Dayrell-Browning. Later in life he took to calling himself a "Catholic agnostic". He died in 1991, aged 86, of leukemia, and was buried in Corseaux cemetery in Switzerland. William Golding called Greene "the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety".
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 12, 2022
If you like movies and admire Graham Greene, this 700 pager is a powerhouse. Discussing "The Third Man," and some confabs w David O Selznick, who had a small financial interest, GG and dir Carol Reed, out of contractual politeness, were required to give ear to DOS:
"Listen, boys, who the hell is going to a film with that title?"
"It's easily remembered," says GG. Blathers DOS: "We want something like 'Night in Vienna,' a title that will bring them in."
DOS later invites GG to lunch in New York to dangle a Great Idea : "It's made for you. The life of Mary Magdalene." GG, thankful he stopped drinking after the 2d martini : "Sorry. It's not really in my line."
--
GG on "The Heart of the Matter," film. It wasn't bad, "but then I
don't like the book much. The religious point of view was exaggerated."
On Fred Astaire, fr a review of "Top Hat," 1935 : "He's the nearest approach we have to a human Mickey Mouse, with his quick physical wit, his incredible agility."
Garbo in "Anna Karenina" : "It is Garbo's personality which makes this film. Very nearly all her acting is in her voice. No other actress can convey physical passion that you believe in, yet there is no actress who depends so little on her own sexual charm."
Louis Mayer, at celeb lunch, London 1937 : "Thank God, I say to you, that it's the greatest year of net results..I shall pray silently that I shall be guided..I hope the Lord will be kind to you.."
---
On the film critic : "He is lucky if 2 or 3 films in the year can be treated with respect." If a critic keeps showing how many films have failed "he will soon lose readers and then his job." GG strongly objects "to the idea that it is the critic's business to assist films of social significance."
---
GGs (hilarious) crise & lawsuit, brought by Fox for his hooting at Shirley Temple's coquetry & "well-developed rump" in "Wee Willie Winkie," 1937, is the raspberry tart.
"Listen, boys, who the hell is going to a film with that title?"
"It's easily remembered," says GG. Blathers DOS: "We want something like 'Night in Vienna,' a title that will bring them in."
DOS later invites GG to lunch in New York to dangle a Great Idea : "It's made for you. The life of Mary Magdalene." GG, thankful he stopped drinking after the 2d martini : "Sorry. It's not really in my line."
--
GG on "The Heart of the Matter," film. It wasn't bad, "but then I
don't like the book much. The religious point of view was exaggerated."
On Fred Astaire, fr a review of "Top Hat," 1935 : "He's the nearest approach we have to a human Mickey Mouse, with his quick physical wit, his incredible agility."
Garbo in "Anna Karenina" : "It is Garbo's personality which makes this film. Very nearly all her acting is in her voice. No other actress can convey physical passion that you believe in, yet there is no actress who depends so little on her own sexual charm."
Louis Mayer, at celeb lunch, London 1937 : "Thank God, I say to you, that it's the greatest year of net results..I shall pray silently that I shall be guided..I hope the Lord will be kind to you.."
---
On the film critic : "He is lucky if 2 or 3 films in the year can be treated with respect." If a critic keeps showing how many films have failed "he will soon lose readers and then his job." GG strongly objects "to the idea that it is the critic's business to assist films of social significance."
---
GGs (hilarious) crise & lawsuit, brought by Fox for his hooting at Shirley Temple's coquetry & "well-developed rump" in "Wee Willie Winkie," 1937, is the raspberry tart.
February 13, 2022
So, finally, I end up finishing one of the longest books that I have ever read in these last few years - excepting, of course, "Midnight's Children" and "Doctor Thorne" which are still the longest, most epic novels that I have finished. And it had to be Graham Greene, of course, no doubt about that. After having read almost all his novels (can somebody find me a pocket-friendly edition of "It's A Battlefield" here in Bombay?), almost all his political articles, his short stories, his travelogues (though his twin African journals are still left to be discovered) and even two of his autobiographical works, what's left now still seems formidable and most irresistibly intriguing. There are his numerous letters to all and sundry, there are his plays, there are his essays and articles on books and authors and his children's books and just now I managed to finish reading his numerous film reviews, essays, articles, interviews and letters, not to forget even those unused stories that he wrote exclusively for the screen, only to be either reshaped and recreated as compelling novels or to be brought to light as yet another facet of his peerless brilliance and versatility.
Even if Greene had not written his uniformly compelling, insightful and utterly resonant novels and stories that have earned him the well-deserved reputation of being one of twentieth-century's greatest storytellers (and in my humble opinion, the finest we had, indeed), he would surely have earned something of an equal reputation as one of the most astute, witty and candid commentators on the art and industry of cinema. Basil Wright, one of his favourite film directors who himself ushered in a poetic genre of documentary film-making back in the 1930s, called Greene, "the child of the age of cinema" (I am paraphrasing here) and nothing could be truer than that. Excited, aroused and even intrigued and inspired by the first ever films and then skeptical but still more or less impressed by the early technological developments of sound and then Technicolor, Greene chronicled the birth and golden heyday of early cinema in the best and most fulfilling sense possible. Working as a film critic between 1935 and 1940, he wrote hundreds of discerning, brilliantly judged, perceptive, hilariously scathing and even affectionately glowing and wistful reviews of almost every major and minor film playing in London's cinemas in these years leading to the tumult of the Second World War. He elicited an array of reactions from his readers - agreement, disagreement, desperate defense and, in one memorable incident, even public notoriety, which was, after all, typical of a storyteller and writer always treading the line of danger and perilous excitement.
That incident - better known to all as the Shirley Temple libel case - is of course recounted here but what David Parkinson, who deserves a round of applause for compiling so much material so cohesively into a single volume and with such meticulous research, also includes is the actual review itself - I do not quote it here because that would be robbing the fun and genuine insight of reading it actually but it would suffice to say that instead of being merely libelous about Miss Temple, the review of "Wee Willie Winkie" hints at a darker truth, about how the bigwigs of Hollywood or any behemoth film industry for that matter are willing to exploit a precocious child actor, many like Miss Temple, to gratify their own innermost and latent desires and fetishes.
A bold, provocative statement to make in 1937, indeed. But then Greene was always generations ahead of most writers of his age and it is not merely hilarity or bold views that one finds in these reviews. Rather, they are dazzlingly erudite, well-informed, perceptive, brilliantly compared with literature, art and poetry and also, since he himself believed in this, hugely entertaining, almost compulsively quotable too. I found myself marking many a sentence, either intelligent or sharply ironic, with sheer admiration and you too will be reaching out for your pencils in due course of time.
In his span as a film reviewer, there is so much wisdom and also a generous serving of flexible objectivity to be found as well. His opinions and preferences, like Fritz Lang over Alfred Hitchcock, Carol Reed over Anthony Asquith, the British documentaries of the GPO Film Unit and Basil Wright over exotic adventure adaptations of Kipling and Haggard and Capra over most other comedies of his time, might raise a few eyebrows today but on reading his reviews, one will understand perfectly what he means and even be convinced by the sound wisdom of his views. His unreserved praise for the urgent political weight of Russian cinema and the realism of French films is balanced by his guilty enjoyment of the more inconsequential entertainers from America; his scathing dislike for the theatricality for most of his own country's expensive films is tempered by his empathy and support for the less expensive films and his encouragement of up-and-coming directors like Reed, Thorold Dickinson and Brian Desmond Hurst to speak of a few.
The reviews form about half of this extensive collection but even the latter half of the volume is equally and even more enlightening and brilliant. These first include Greene's young and scholarly attempts to deconstruct the art of cinema in its technical and thematic qualities, articles and essays that still hold many valuable insights and lessons for anyone interested to understand cinema as a student understanding its science and its art, and as one flips the pages and discovers even wonderful gems like a tribute to Alexander Korda, whose films Greene lambasted but whom he befriended most effusively, and a letter in support of Chaplin, at the time when the legend was prosecuted and shunned in America for his alleged "Communist sympathies", one witnesses the transformation of Greene, from an earnest student of the field of cinema to a seasoned veteran in this field, with even a brush in film production that was far from perfect but was memorable in its own jaunty fashion.
After the essays, articles and lectures, one stumbles on other rare pieces - interview excerpts, largely taken from the later years of Greene's life, when he had taken a backseat from active involvement in cinema and yet in these interviews, he demonstrates the same piercing insight about the films adapted from his own works and what went wrong or occasionally right in them. The wit is elegant and pointed as ever and one wishes that these interviews went on and on. They are followed by Greene's equally candid and wry letters in response to reactions to his reviews and even in defense of the people involved in his adaptations. For, of course, apart from his cutting wit, Greene was also known for his generous compassion, a quality that is often ignored in most critical appraisals of his personality.
The last part of the volume is special. It contains, apart from the two small story sketches that are already published with "The Tenth Man", two other film treatments that were eventually unpublished for a long time till after his death. The first, "No Man's Land" is a most memorable Greene story of slippery borders, disorientation, imperfect espionage, religion, illicit romance and a cathartic conclusion set behind the Iron Curtain and written with the same dry irony and acerbic moral realism that one found in "The Third Man" and his other post-war and Cold-War stories. The second, even more vividly observed and slowly simmering with suspense, is the unfinished draft for the story of the film "The Stranger's Hand" - set in a Venice, both evocative and unvarnished, and thickened skilfully by a plot of intrigue and kidnapping, this is also a poignant little tale of a little lonely boy trying to track down his father who is missing since his arrival in the city. Many red herrings turn up and even as the story is literally unfinished, it has all the makings of an unforgettable little novella.
Zadie Smith memorably said that no other writer had the complete command of one's material as Greene had. In her own words, roughly, what he wrote as reportage became a novel or a film story and then any of these two things became reportage again and the purely organic process of reshaping and recycling one's rich reservoir of experiences ensured that he never ran out of stories to tell. It would not be far-fetched to call Greene as not merely the most prolific but the most influential, affecting and resonant storyteller and chronicler of an entire century who held readers in thrall for nearly seven decades without ever running out of imagination, skill and relevance. "Mornings In The Dark" is much, much more than just a book about films, about film criticism and everything that makes or mars a film; it is also, like every other work of Greene, an epic testament to all these truths and filled with an overflowing tide of stories for us all.
Even if Greene had not written his uniformly compelling, insightful and utterly resonant novels and stories that have earned him the well-deserved reputation of being one of twentieth-century's greatest storytellers (and in my humble opinion, the finest we had, indeed), he would surely have earned something of an equal reputation as one of the most astute, witty and candid commentators on the art and industry of cinema. Basil Wright, one of his favourite film directors who himself ushered in a poetic genre of documentary film-making back in the 1930s, called Greene, "the child of the age of cinema" (I am paraphrasing here) and nothing could be truer than that. Excited, aroused and even intrigued and inspired by the first ever films and then skeptical but still more or less impressed by the early technological developments of sound and then Technicolor, Greene chronicled the birth and golden heyday of early cinema in the best and most fulfilling sense possible. Working as a film critic between 1935 and 1940, he wrote hundreds of discerning, brilliantly judged, perceptive, hilariously scathing and even affectionately glowing and wistful reviews of almost every major and minor film playing in London's cinemas in these years leading to the tumult of the Second World War. He elicited an array of reactions from his readers - agreement, disagreement, desperate defense and, in one memorable incident, even public notoriety, which was, after all, typical of a storyteller and writer always treading the line of danger and perilous excitement.
That incident - better known to all as the Shirley Temple libel case - is of course recounted here but what David Parkinson, who deserves a round of applause for compiling so much material so cohesively into a single volume and with such meticulous research, also includes is the actual review itself - I do not quote it here because that would be robbing the fun and genuine insight of reading it actually but it would suffice to say that instead of being merely libelous about Miss Temple, the review of "Wee Willie Winkie" hints at a darker truth, about how the bigwigs of Hollywood or any behemoth film industry for that matter are willing to exploit a precocious child actor, many like Miss Temple, to gratify their own innermost and latent desires and fetishes.
A bold, provocative statement to make in 1937, indeed. But then Greene was always generations ahead of most writers of his age and it is not merely hilarity or bold views that one finds in these reviews. Rather, they are dazzlingly erudite, well-informed, perceptive, brilliantly compared with literature, art and poetry and also, since he himself believed in this, hugely entertaining, almost compulsively quotable too. I found myself marking many a sentence, either intelligent or sharply ironic, with sheer admiration and you too will be reaching out for your pencils in due course of time.
In his span as a film reviewer, there is so much wisdom and also a generous serving of flexible objectivity to be found as well. His opinions and preferences, like Fritz Lang over Alfred Hitchcock, Carol Reed over Anthony Asquith, the British documentaries of the GPO Film Unit and Basil Wright over exotic adventure adaptations of Kipling and Haggard and Capra over most other comedies of his time, might raise a few eyebrows today but on reading his reviews, one will understand perfectly what he means and even be convinced by the sound wisdom of his views. His unreserved praise for the urgent political weight of Russian cinema and the realism of French films is balanced by his guilty enjoyment of the more inconsequential entertainers from America; his scathing dislike for the theatricality for most of his own country's expensive films is tempered by his empathy and support for the less expensive films and his encouragement of up-and-coming directors like Reed, Thorold Dickinson and Brian Desmond Hurst to speak of a few.
The reviews form about half of this extensive collection but even the latter half of the volume is equally and even more enlightening and brilliant. These first include Greene's young and scholarly attempts to deconstruct the art of cinema in its technical and thematic qualities, articles and essays that still hold many valuable insights and lessons for anyone interested to understand cinema as a student understanding its science and its art, and as one flips the pages and discovers even wonderful gems like a tribute to Alexander Korda, whose films Greene lambasted but whom he befriended most effusively, and a letter in support of Chaplin, at the time when the legend was prosecuted and shunned in America for his alleged "Communist sympathies", one witnesses the transformation of Greene, from an earnest student of the field of cinema to a seasoned veteran in this field, with even a brush in film production that was far from perfect but was memorable in its own jaunty fashion.
After the essays, articles and lectures, one stumbles on other rare pieces - interview excerpts, largely taken from the later years of Greene's life, when he had taken a backseat from active involvement in cinema and yet in these interviews, he demonstrates the same piercing insight about the films adapted from his own works and what went wrong or occasionally right in them. The wit is elegant and pointed as ever and one wishes that these interviews went on and on. They are followed by Greene's equally candid and wry letters in response to reactions to his reviews and even in defense of the people involved in his adaptations. For, of course, apart from his cutting wit, Greene was also known for his generous compassion, a quality that is often ignored in most critical appraisals of his personality.
The last part of the volume is special. It contains, apart from the two small story sketches that are already published with "The Tenth Man", two other film treatments that were eventually unpublished for a long time till after his death. The first, "No Man's Land" is a most memorable Greene story of slippery borders, disorientation, imperfect espionage, religion, illicit romance and a cathartic conclusion set behind the Iron Curtain and written with the same dry irony and acerbic moral realism that one found in "The Third Man" and his other post-war and Cold-War stories. The second, even more vividly observed and slowly simmering with suspense, is the unfinished draft for the story of the film "The Stranger's Hand" - set in a Venice, both evocative and unvarnished, and thickened skilfully by a plot of intrigue and kidnapping, this is also a poignant little tale of a little lonely boy trying to track down his father who is missing since his arrival in the city. Many red herrings turn up and even as the story is literally unfinished, it has all the makings of an unforgettable little novella.
Zadie Smith memorably said that no other writer had the complete command of one's material as Greene had. In her own words, roughly, what he wrote as reportage became a novel or a film story and then any of these two things became reportage again and the purely organic process of reshaping and recycling one's rich reservoir of experiences ensured that he never ran out of stories to tell. It would not be far-fetched to call Greene as not merely the most prolific but the most influential, affecting and resonant storyteller and chronicler of an entire century who held readers in thrall for nearly seven decades without ever running out of imagination, skill and relevance. "Mornings In The Dark" is much, much more than just a book about films, about film criticism and everything that makes or mars a film; it is also, like every other work of Greene, an epic testament to all these truths and filled with an overflowing tide of stories for us all.
March 31, 2020
Graham Greene’s film reviews are very interesting, I don’t always agree with what he says, but they are always enjoyable to read. They cover a period from 1936-1940, so include some of my favourite films. some of his opinions surprised me - he disliked the films of Alfred Hitchcock for instance, and admits to initially having disliked the idea of sound being added to films. He was likewise initially unenthusiastic about colour films. Anyone who likes films of the 30s and 40s should find these reviews interesting. The film reviews take up slightly over half the book, the rest is made up of essays, interviews, Film stories and treatments. But the reviews are the best part.
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November 19, 2013GG's film review collection
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