OUR MAN IN THE CINEMA
Graham Greene reviewed films for
The Spectator in the Thirties. Christopher Hawtree selects uncollected extracts WHEN Graham Greene left the Times at the end of the 1920s, reviewing books for The Spectator must have eased the burden of the impoverished writer. In July 1935 he succeeded Charles Davy as film critic, which he did fairly regularly for a couple of years, and then intermittently until 1941.
Greene said it was 'after the dangerous third martini' that he suggested he should review films for The Spectator? These articles were gathered 30 years later as The Pleasure-Dome, a volume to which one can turn repeatedly. It is the most sustained, knowledgeable and visual writing about films, a world away from the academic verbiage of 'film studies'. Anybody of discernment must surely prefer to read Greene than to look at Garbo, especially when he makes bold to say that 'seeing Garbo has always seemed to me a little like reading Carlyle: good, oh very good, but work rather than play'; hers were 'hardly movies at all, so retarded are they by her haggard equine renunciations, the slow consummation of her noble adulteries'.
Emphatically subtitled 'collected film criticism 1935-40', The Pleasure-Dome in fact omits a great deal from that period. But to take down those hefty, buff binders which house 55-year-old copies of this magazine is to be reminded of the wit which Greene brought to every aspect of this most diversely energetic of literary lives. Here, then, are some extracts from the numerous unknown film reviews.
Devil Dogs of the Air, with James Cagney, 'is all very boyish and boisterous. Military propaganda in of seems to have got into the hands of the "rotarians". Here they are "selling" the aerial arm of the American navy in just the same way as they will sell a Kleen-Eazy brush: the film has the striped-tie air, the breathless flow of wisecracks, the toe insinuated across the doorway. But luckily there is no obligation on an Englishman to purchase.' Holds are never barred: 'A Fire Has Been Arranged is meant to be funny and is very, very dreary. Flanagan and Allen seem to be famous comedians. Some peo- ple laughed but, like most English farces, it made me embarrassed. I wanted to stop everyone and tell them they oughtn't to play the fool in public; a private joke should not be repeated noisily before strangers. I felt rather sad and outcast, as I do on the rare occasions when I look at English comic weeklies. Perhaps it was that association which made me feel at the end that I had been waiting a long, long while for a haircut and had come away without one.'
Barbed phrases are dotted throughout. Thanks A Million 'is very well acted, even by Mr Dick Powell'. 'A bad week is completed by a Gaumont-British News reel which scores the lowest marks yet for editing — if it was edited at all. Beginning with a football match it ends with the Chinese war sandwiched between a per- forming ape and I can't remember what. This is not only bad journalism: it is bad taste.' How one wishes that more review- ers of, say, Dances With Wolves an Merchant-Ivory, would remark, as Greene did of In Name One, 'this is a classy, not a first-class picture.' William Powell always receives praise. Films such as his The Ex-Mrs Bradford owe their entertaining quality to 'a strong sense of reality. The detection may be faulty, but the characters behave realisti- cally. I prefer this to the English school of scholarly detection and Wimsey psycholo- gy.' And this was a film in which 'two murders [are] carried out ingeniously if unconvincingly with the help of poisonous spiders enclosed in gelatine capsules which melt with the heat of the human body'.
Of a film set in a lunatic asylum, Private Worlds, he says that `Mr Charles Boyer's performances are always admirable; you can believe, listening to his deep nervous voice, in the icy country behind the eyes. But nothing could be less frozen than Miss Colbert; she is not an actress who can suggest abnormality, the austerity of the doctor any more than the sensuality of the Egyptian. It is her chief charm that she is so normal; she can be nothing but the pleasantest of light company.' The Three Musketeers in 1936, 'when it leaves Constance, D'Artagnan's rather tame Victorian betrothed, behind in Paris, is agreeably exciting in quite the manner of the old Westerns: galloping horses, last- minute rescues and a most seductive villai- ness acted by Miss Margot Grahame. It left me wondering how it was that Dumas, with the help of an American director, had caught so deftly the English public school atmosphere — or rather the English public school as it is reflected by a sympathetic and sentimental writer. When the film wasn't Western, it was authentic Stalky.'
There are so many of these reviews one could choose from. In Old Iron Tom Walls `shows no improvement as a director: an embarrassing little stage comedy of paren- tal affection, shot hurriedly from the front as you would shoot a charging lion.' `Stranded in Paris is a film of unrelieved gaiety, set in the American Paris — all subservient waiters, long loaves, comic hotel-keepers, sidelong looks and naïve carnality. It slides down fairly easily like an Alpine glow or a Knickerbocker Glory, and you emerge a little cloyed perhaps, but without any distinct feeling of nausea unless you happen to be French.' Another version of The Three Musketeers came his way, but 'I was unable to endure more than half an hour. Somebody has had the idea of trying to give this old drab of stage and screen new life with the help of the Ritz Brothers — but their hideous performance lends only a nervous monkey-gland twitch- ing to the corpse.'
'I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany is the story of Miss Isobel Steele, a young Amer- ican journalist who was imprisoned in 1934 on a charge of espionage. It is an odd shabby picture, with cheap sets and name- less players of indeterminate nationality, full of queer accents and queerer dinner- jackets. Miss Steele plays Miss Steele as if she was sleep-walking, a lanky figure in a shapeless skirt protesting innocence to blond fanatics. As propaganda it is as complete a failure as Dr Goebbels's: the only emotion it arouses is hilarity.'
It is astonishing to think of how much knowledge Greene had at his fingertips in a darkened room, and not just of the impor- tant facts. Of something called The Rains Came, a tale of adversity in the Empire, he remarked in parentheses, 'incidentally, I feel that "the will to live" as a medical property is rather overworked: we have had it three times in a fortnight.'
In describing The Roaring Twenties he gets that 'bull-calf brow' of James Cagney exactly right, and also, lost all these years, is a phrase to relish in his description of Battle of Broadway. . . a former strip- tease artiste, Miss Gipsy Rose Lee, makes her first film appearance — under the name of Miss Louise Hovick — with excessive refinement: "All reht, boys. Er'll give it a treh," long drooping aristocratic eyelids, and a figure so elaborately ba- lanced it might have come out of a ship- breaker's yard.'
Such writing makes it a little easier to bear Greene's death. At a time when com- mentary has been vast, scrappy and in- accurate, the thing is to read him.
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