James Naremore - More Than Night - Film Noir in Its Contexts

Greene had long since become a convert to Catholicism and socialism, and during his university years he developed an intense admiration for the writings of Conrad, James, Ford, Pound, and Eliot. He was happy to take money from the Book Society and Hollywood, but he was uneasy about popularity; thus one of the characters he invented for Stambol Train is a rather nasty parody of J. B. Priestly, a sentimental, quasi-Dickensian novelist who was Heinemann's perennial bestseller. To make his uneasiness even more clear, Greene labeled this book and all his subsequent thrillers "entertainments," marking them off from his more ambitious writings about religion and politics. He was nevertheless fascinated by exotic settings and physical danger, and he had a gift for mystery and suspense. While working on Stambol Train, he reread Heart of Darkness, noting in his diary that it was possible to "write finely" within the conventions of an adventure story (quoted in Sherry, 1:421). The trick was to invert certain conventions, at the same time offering sensational action that would provoke anxieties appropriate to the Depression.

Since childhood, Greene had been enamored of the popular spy novels of John Buchan, whom he praised for writing about "adventure in familiar surroundings happening to unadventurous men." 34By the 1930s, however, Buchan's patriotic stories of World War I seemed badly out of date. His heroes were square-jawed Tory gentlemen, rugged South African landowners, and North American tycoons who believed in the natural superiority of the British race; his settings were pastoral, infused with a Wordsworthian love of the Scottish countryside; his religion and morality were derived from Pilgrim's Progress; and his plots were virtually devoid of sex. In writing his own thrillers, Greene preserved Buchan's skillful plotting and sense of violence breaking through polite British civilization, but he took a different approach to almost everything else. His protagonists were psychologically twisted criminals or drab socialist intellectuals, hunted down by the forces of what one of them calls "an old world . . . full of injustice and muddle"; his settings were thoroughly urban, rendered through a vivid, imagistic prose; his narration made use of internal monologues and complex shifts in point of view; and his endings were darkly ironic, pervaded by a sense of Kafkaesque guilt. He was quite good at exploring the ambiguous borderland between the individual subject and the authoritarian state, and he often played upon the intertwined public and private implications of "spying," hinting at his characters' deep-seated sexual motives. Perhaps most important, he created a feeling of dread by observing the seedy details of ordinary lifeas when he wrote that the protagonist of The Ministry of Fear "was often ill, his teeth were bad and he suffered from an inefficient dentist" (21).

All of Greene's entertainments took place in what reviewers and critics described as "Greeneland"a world of dingy rooming houses, canned fish, drooping aspidistras, and doomed characters. "The sordid sends Greene into lyrical flights," one commentator remarks, but it is difficult to say whether the mise-en-scene of the novels is intended to evoke a nostalgie de la boue, a disgust at genteel poverty, or an Orwellian fear of dropping out of the middle class. The atmosphere frequently resembles T. S. Eliot in his brooding, overtly anti-Semitic period. In A Gun for Sale (1936), for example, the protagonist visits an abortionist named Doctor Yogel to have surgery performed on a harelip. Yogel works out of a dimly lit office on a back street; his fingernails are dirty, he smells of brandy, and he sweats as he approaches with a scalpel. Trembling and squinting in the bad light, he mutters, "I'm used to it . . . I have a good eye." 36

Greene's anti-Semitism in the 1930s is implicit, but it is nonetheless systemic (a trait he also shares with Buchan). His least sympathetic characters include a Jewish arms manufacturer who arranges the murder of a socialist War Minister, a Jewish gangster with "raisin eyes" who controls the underworld in Brighton, and a Jewish aristocrat who runs a supermodern resort called the Lido. He seems to associate Jewishness not only with a dark racial otherness but also, more specifically, with modernity and American-style capitalismand in this regard he is remarkably like Eliot, to whom he frequently alludes. 37"Greeneland" could in fact be understood as what Michael Shelden calls "a province of the Waste Land" (99), or as a conscious imitation of Eliot's poetry in the period between 1912 and 1922. Borrowing heavily from nineteenth-century French literature, Eliot wrote about an "unreal city" made up of cheap hotels, half-deserted streets, rat-infested canals, newspapers in vacant lots, lonely typists in empty rooms, snippets of banal conversation, and random scraps of pop tunes. Greene imported all these details into his thrillers, bringing with them many of Eliot's religious, racial, and cultural ideas. As a result, he gave melodrama a metaphysical aura and a complex ideological effect. In political terms, he was a radical leftist, outraged by social injustice; but in religious and cultural terms, he was a radical conservative, appalled by the loss of ''organic" society and by the rise of kitschy resorts or modern housing developments such as the one in A Gun for Sale, where the architecture is fake Tudor and the main street is called Shakespeare Avenue. As one of his characters remarks, the modern world represents "something worse than the meanness of poverty, the meanness of spirit" (44).

But the fallen world of "Greeneland" also resembled a certain kind of movie. In his student days Greene had been the film critic for Oxford Outlook (his brother Hugh was the first president of the Oxford film society), and for several years he was an avid reader of Close Up, a high-modernist film journal whose contributors included H. D. and other important literary figures. From the beginning of his career he nourished an ambition to write for motion pictures, and from 1935 until 1940 he contributed a regular column of film reviews to The Spectator and Night and Day (the latter a British version of The New Yorker). These reviews were clearly related to his aims as a novelist, as we can see from his descriptions of the scenes or images he admires; his attitude toward popular melodrama, however, was qualified or critical, foreshadowing the noirlike cinema he would help to create in the years after the war.

Like nearly all the latter-day modernists, Greene was dismayed by American modernity, which was epitomized in the Hollywood film factories. In the opening lines of his first review for The Spectator, he decries "the bright slick streamlined civilization . . . whose popular art is on the level of The Bride of Frankenstein." James Whale's film, he argues, was "set in motion by a vast machinery of actors, sound systems and trick shots and yes-men; presently, I have no doubt, it will be color-shot and televised; later in the Brave New World to become a smelly" (5). Two years later, reviewing Whale's Road Back, he was even more savage:

[What the film] really emphasizes is the eternal adolescence of the American mind, to which literature means the poetry of Longfellow and morality means keeping Mother's Day and looking after the kid sister's purity. One came daunted out of the cinema and there, strolling up the Haymarket, dressed in blue uniforms with little forage-caps and medals clinking, were the American Legionnaires, arm in arm with women dressed just the sameall guide-books, glasses, and military salutes: caps marked Santa Anna and Minnesota: hairwhat there was of itgrey, but with the same adolescent features, plump, smug, sentimental, ready for the easy tear and the hearty laugh and the fraternity yell. What use in pretending that with these allies it was ever possible to fight for civilization? For Mother's Day, yes, for anti-vivisection and humanitarianism, the pet dog and the home fire, for the co-ed college and the campus. Civilization would shock them: eyes on the guidebook for safety, they pass it quickly as if it were a nude in a national collection. (17273)