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

Greene repeatedly complained about the mixture of sentiment and chrome-plated sleekness in Hollywood. He was opposed to sound, color, and every new technical development in filmalthough in later years, watching "Monsieur Godard," he admitted to a nostalgia for the "dead thirties" and for "Cecil B. DeMille and his Crusaders'' (4). He admired Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and especially Lang's Fury, but the ordinary run of genre movies rarely provoked his interest. Ironically, his first review for The Spectator contains a passing reference to the 1934 Paramount adaptation of Hammett's Glass Key, which he describes as "unimaginatively gangster." He was more attracted to a few scenes in Goldwyn's Dead End, in which Humphrey Bogart conveyed a "ruthless sentimentalist who has melodramatized himself from the start," and in which director William Wyler supplied a proper background of "beetle-ridden staircases and mud and mist" (181). He also praised the RKO adaptation of Maxwell Anderson's Winterset, a verse drama about crime in the city; he especially liked "the whole wintry scene in the drenching sleet under the sooty arches," which reminded him of "the Jacobeans at their most bloody and exact" (143).

Aside from documentaries like Night Mail, Greene also had little regard for British films. He even criticized Hitchcock, whom he described as talented but Hollywoodish, more interested in spectacle and visual gags than in realism or dramatic values. He repeatedly complained of "how inexcusably [Hitchcock] spoilt The Thirty-Nine Steps " (12), and he gave only qualified praise to Sabotage, Hitchcock's adaptation of Conrad's Secret Agent. The "dark drab passionate" qualities of this story, he argued, could "never find a place in the popular cinema," except perhaps in the hands of a French director like Jacques Feyder (123).

It was the French whom Greene admired above all. The most enthusiastic review he ever wrote was for Pépé le Moko (released in London in 1937), which seemed "a whole continent away from the usual studio banalities":

Perhaps there have been pictures as exciting on the "thriller" level as this before (though it would be hard to equal the shooting of Regis, the informer, with its comic horror: the little fat eunuch sweating and squealing in the corner between the aspidistra and the mechanical piano, the clash and clatter of the potted music as his dying friend is helped across the room to finish him at point-blank range, friends steadying the revolver on its mark), but I cannot remember one which has succeeded so admirably in raising the thriller to a poetic level. Winterset seems a little jejune and obvious and literary beside it. Fury, perhaps, is its equal, but in Fury Fritz Lang was not allowed to follow his subject to the right, the grim conclusion. His hero couldn't burn; but Pepe cuts his throat with a penknife in his handcuffed hands outside the dock gates as the steamer leaves for France. The theme of no freedom anywhere is not lost in a happy ending. (145)

These are precisely the effects Greene was trying to achieve as a novelist, and he found them everywhere in French cinema. When he saw Hôtel du Nord, he admired "the tuft of cotton-wool in the young man's ear which seems to speak of a whole timid and untidy life" (230). In the Julian Duvivier episode of Carnet de bal, he discovered a series of admirably sordid effects: "the seedy doctor at Marseille so used to furtive visitors and illegal operations that he doesn't wait for questions before he lights the spirit flame: the dreadful cataracted eye: the ingrained dirt upon his hands: the shrewish wife picked up in God knows what low music-hall railing behind bead curtains: the continuous shriek and grind of wench and crane" (184).

Again and again, Greene praised the French for their "realistic" and "poetic" qualities.

(Had he known of a movement called "poetic realism," he would surely have embraced it.)

Their best films contained values he had admired since 1928, when he wrote his first article on movies for the London Timesan article that clearly shows his fascination with an ironic mixture of romance, perversity, and quotidian horror, communicated through realistic black-and-white photography. "The object of film," he asserts, "should be the translation of thought back into images. America has made the mistake of translating it into action." (Another way of making this point would be to say that Hollywood valued plot over mood, or ' 'content" over "form.'') Repeatedly he cites a moment from his favorite silent picture, Greed, to illustrate the imagistic "passion" that film has at its disposal: "The scene was a rainy day at a seaside 'resort.' The lovers were shown only as two backs, receding down a long breakwater, on each side a leaden sea and a lashing rain, which failed to disturb their complete self-absorption" (quoted in Sherry, 1:414).

The French often conveyed this sort of poeticized fatalism, but equally important where Greene was concerned, they made innovative use of crime stories. The Popular Front developed a left-wing, modestly budgeted art cinema, grounded in local color and dealing with murder and romance; this strategy was a challenge to Hollywood, and it seemed to offer possibilities for the British industry. Greene recognized that film was a mass medium, and he believed that highly charged poetic imagery should rise out of popular narrative. He insisted that "if you excite your audience first, you can put over what you will of horror, suffering, truth" (quoted in Sherry, 1:597). The logical formula for such effects, he observed, was "blood melodrama." The problem in England was that "there never has been a school of popular English blood. We have been damned from the start by middle-class virtues, by gentlemen cracksmen and stolen plans and Mr. Wu's." The solution was "to go further back than this, dive below the polite level, to something nearer to common life." If the British could only develop "the scream of cars in flight, all the old excitements at their simplest and most sure-fire, then we can beginsecretly, with low cunningto develop our poetic drama. . . . Our characters can develop from the level of The Spanish Tragedy toward a subtler, more thoughtful level" (quoted in Sherry, 1:597).

In America, Dashiell Hammett had already achieved a mixture of artistry and raw, bloody excitementespecially in Red Harvest, one of the few Hammett novels that classic Hollywood never adapted. 40Greene, however, was much more attracted to the native English tradition of revenge tragedy. Once again he was following the lead of Eliot, who had a fondness for the sort of imagery one might find in a horror movie, and whose critical writings of the 1920s and 1930s stimulated a revaluation of such perversely violent Jacobean dramatists as John Webster and John Ford. Indeed the mutually reinforcing influence of Eliot, Jacobean revenge tragedy, and the prewar French cinema explains virtually all of Greene's writing in this period. A Gun for Sale, for instance, is a revenge narrative set in an urban wasteland, featuring not only a memorably violent and "cinematic" opening chapter, but also a religious motif. (A hired killer becomes a scapegoat and an ironic Christ figure.)

The same nexus of interests becomes even more evident in Brighton Rock (1938), Greene's strangest, most serious, and certainly most noir thriller, which in its English edition was not classified as an entertainment. The plot of this unusual novel involves a gang war in the English coastal resort of Brighton: a small-time journalist named Hale indirectly helps a Jewish crime lord to kill off a rival mobster named Kite. In retaliation, Hale is kidnapped and sadistically murdered by Pinkie Brown, a boyish, baby-faced killer who regards Kite as his surrogate father. A barmaid named Ida Arnold, who enjoyed casual sex with Hale on the day of his death, becomes a sort of detective or agent of vengeance. With Ida's assistance, the police corner Pinkiebut not before he seduces and marries an innocent working girl named Rose in order to prevent her from revealing evidence that might incriminate him. In a scene reminiscent of countless gangster movies, the young psychopath attempts to evade capture and dies a spectacular death, leaving the pregnant Rose behind to face a grim future.