Greene's salad days
From Dr Paul Hetherington Sir: Just after reading Mark Steyn's review of the film The End of the Affair (Arts, 12 February) I came across a short essay by Graham Greene that must be little known, and which offered a surprisingly relevant comment. He published it in February 1925, when he was 20 years old, in the Oxford Out- look, an undergraduate magazine of which he was then the editor. The essay was titled The Average Film', and he opened it with the statement, 'We are most of us nowadays considerably oversexed.' His essay contin- ued, in rather prim tones, to deplore the ten- dency that he perceived for films which he had recently seen to concentrate on sex at the expense of aesthetic content. The 'aver- age film' (he felt) should have minimal sex interest, and he ended the essay by saying that films he liked 'appealed to a sense of beauty and not to a sense of sex'. Could this be yet further evidence that it was the later embrace of Rome that wrought such a liber- ating change in his views?
Paul Hetherington
15 Luttrell Avenue, London SW15
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