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

Brighton Rocks events may seem generic, but its mood is reminiscent of pictures such as Hôtel du Nord, its epigraph comes from The Witch of Edmunton, and its themes are indebted to Eliot's commentary on the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. The last of these sources was particularly important. In a famous essay, Eliot argues that Baudelaire was an instinctively religious artist who believed in original sin, not in "natural" sex or the "Right and Wrong" of secular humanism. The Frenchman's greatest achievement as a poet, Eliot claims, lay in his recognition that "what distinguishes the relations of man and woman from the copulation of beasts is the knowledge of Good and Evil.'' 41Such a man might choose Satanism and be forever damned, but at least he was no wishy-washy liberal; according to Eliot, "in a world of electoral reforms, plebiscites, sex reform, and dress reform, [damnation] is an immediate form of salvationof salvation from the ennui of modern life, because it . . . gives some significance to living" (181).

Eliot's argument had a demonstrable effect on Greene, who turned Pinkie Brown into a working-class Baudelaire. 42At the same time, Greene made use of a technique he had learned from Henry James: the manipulation of the reader by shifting the point of view from one center of consciousness to another. Brighton Rock begins with Hale, the murder victim; then it moves to Ida, a bosomy, fun-loving woman of the people, who sets out after the killer because, as she tells us, "I believe in right and wrong." 43As the plot develops, however, Ida begins to resemble one of those Americans Greene had seen walking down Haymarket, who stood for "humanitarianism, the pet dog and the home fire." In effect, she is an allegorical figure, representing Woman as Modernity and Mass Culture. Not surprisingly, she gets her values from Hollywood melodrama: "she cried in cinemas at David Copperfield ," Greene tells us; "easy pathos touched her friendly and popular heart" (41) 44The ''Boy" Pinkie, in contrast, is a Satanist who enjoys slicing people with razors and provoking the wrath of God each time he commits a murder. Through his eyes, the Americanized culture of Brighton takes on a surreal quality. During one of his conversations with Rose, a seaside orchestra can be heard in the background: "Suddenly at the stale romantic tune the orchestra was playing'lovely to look at, beautiful to hold, and heaven itselfa little venom of anger and hatred came out on the Boy's lips" (66).

Given the choice between Ida's sentimental humanitarianism and Pinkie's twisted Catholicism, Greene has more sympathy for the young killer. He is also intrigued by the sadomasochistic relation between Pinkie and Rose, which differs strikingly from the casual, earthy lovemaking enjoyed by Ida. In the second half of the novel, Greene exploits this perverse bonding for all it is worth, emphasizing the spiritual conflict for souls rather than the secular battle for lives. Pinkie believes in the possibility of salvation and is fascinated with priests, but he also has a disgust of sex and a need to push Rose into eternal damnation. When he catches a glimpse of her thigh, Greene tells us that "a prick of sexual desire disturbed him like a sickness" (130). Near the end of the novel, Kite appears to him in a dreambleeding from the mouth, offering a razor, and murmuring "Such tits." Like Prince Hamlet, Pinkie believes that his dead father is asking for revenge, but he has a better plan than straightforward murder: he gives the devoutly Catholic Rose a revolver and tempts her with a mutual suicide pact that he has no intention of joining. "All you need do is pull on this," he says. "It isn't hard. Put it in your earthat'll hold it steady" (349).

Fortunately, the police arrive in the nick of time. Pinkie dies a horrible death, smashing a bottle of vitriol in his face and plunging over a cliff. In a final twist, however, Greene denies his readers even a religious consolation. Disturbed because Pinkie died without asking forgiveness for his sins, Rose visits St. John's church in Brighton, where a priest alludes to the conservative Catholic Charles Péguy and tells her of the "appalling . . . strangeness of the mercy of God": "If [Pinkie] loved you, surely, that shows there was some good" (357). When we last see Rose, she is returning to her room to listen to a recording Pinkie made for her on Brighton Pier. She does not know (but we do) that the message on the record is "God damn you, you little bitch, why can't you go back home forever and let me be?" This conclusion raises the stakes of melodrama and then, in the fashion of the darkest Jacobean revenge dramas, it knocks out all the props. Notice, too, how it reverses the situation at the end of Heart of Darkness, where Marlow refuses to tell the upper-class ''Intended" that Kurtz's last words were "The horror, the horror! " In Brighton Rock, a working-class woman is about to learn the full truth about the man she has married, from his own lips. Greene's closing sentence tells us that "she walked rapidly in the thin June sunlight towards the worst horror of all" (358).

In 1938, there was little chance that such a novel could be turned into a movie; but in 1947, with the war ended, with noirlike cinema in vogue, and with Greene established as a successful author who had provided material for Hollywood, Brighton Rock became a West End play and then a British film. The theatrical version, written by Terence Rattigan, omitted the novel's shocking conclusion, but Greene was determined that the film would not do the same.

Before discussing Greene's motion-picture adaptation of Brighton Rock, however, something needs to be said about Hollywood's uses of his work during and immediately after the war, when he achieved international celebrity. At first Greene was a problem for the studios, because he was a best-selling author who subverted popular conventions. Classic Hollywood's method of dealing with him is perhaps best illustrated by This Gun for Hire (1942), one of the earliest and most commercially successful adaptations of his crime fiction. Paramount had acquired rights to A Gun for Sale before it was published in 1936, but the studio did not develop a script until 1941after the Warner remake of The Maltese Falcon, after the Hawthornden Prize for British literature had been awarded to Greene's Power and the Glory, and after the war had made overt criticism of fascism acceptable. 45Under the credits to the completed film, the studio exhibited a leather-bound copy of the novel, as if to capitalize on Greene's literary prestige. Yet the narrative we see on the screen is quite different from the one Greene had written. The novel tells the story of a hired killer named Raven (an obvious allusion to Poe), who assassinates a socialist war minister in prewar England. Raven's employers hope to turn a profit in the munitions industry, but when they doublecross the killer by paying him in stolen banknotes, he exacts vengeance; in the end, he becomes an unwitting agent of social justice and a scapegoat who meets violent death at the hands of the law. (He is reluctantly betrayed by an attractive working-class woman whom he has begun to trust.) The Paramount screenplay, credited to Albert Maltz and W. R. Burnett (the author of Little Caesar), moves the locale to America and smoothes over most of Greene's ironiesall in the interest of wartime propaganda. In the fashion of many other crime films of the early 1940s (such as All Through the Night, a Bogart gangster picture made at Warner in the same year), it converts the villains into Nazi fifth-columnists and the protagonist into a victim of Depression-era social injustice who becomes a champion of democracy. It also changes the hero's looks: the novel's Raven suffers from a harelip, but the film's Raven, played by Alan Ladd, is a strikingly attractive young man whose only imperfection is a slightly deformed left wrist. 46In fact, This Gun for Hire turned Ladd and Veronica Lake into the sexiest commodities in Hollywood; a pair of diminutive and sullenly pretty blonds, they seem an almost incestuous couple, and the dark, Germanic setting provides a foil to their California-style beauty.