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

Despite these and other changes, Paramount did not make a bad film. The studio divested the novel of its anti-Semitic elements and some of its heavy symbolism, and it added a photographic expressionism that has its own particular merits. When This Gun for Hire reached Paris in 1946, it was received as a key work in a developing noir "series." Borde and Chaumeton ranked it among three seminal pictures: The Maltese Falcon provided film noir with its criminal psychology; The Shanghai Gesture created a distinctive noir eroticism; and This Gun for Hire established both a new character type (the "angelic killer") and the convention of a surreal chase through an urban landscape (45). The opening sequence of the Greene adaptation was singled out for special praise: from a low angle, we see Alan Ladd sitting on a bed in a sleazy boardinghouse, loading a gun while honky-tonk music drifts through a window; he rises, puts on a hat and coat, and gently feeds milk to a stray cat; a housemaid enters, wearing lipstick and a low-cut blouse, as if she has just stepped off the cover of a pulp magazine; she tries to chase away the cat, and Ladd slaps her in the face. Here as elsewhere, Ladd's behavior is deadpan, enigmatic, and graceful; he seems quite unlike Greene's Raven, but also unlike any Hollywood hero or villain of the previous decade. Borde and Chaumeton quote two lines from Baudelaire that "seem to have been written for him": " Je te frapperai sans colère / Et sans haine, comme un boucher" (46; "I will strike you down without anger / And without hatred, like a butcher"). The allusion is in some ways appropriatenot because Ladd resembles a butcher, but because he conveys the impression of a coolly lethal dandy.

The same mixture of glamour and moral unease can be seen in Paramount's 1945 adaptation of The Ministry of Fear, an enjoyably paranoid "wrong man" thriller that, in comparison with Greene, looks rather glossy and Hitchcockian. Ironically, the Hollywood film that best evokes "Greeneland" is the 1945 Warner production of The Confidential Agent, which derives from a novel that Greene regarded as one of his worst. (He wrote the book at breakneck speed, devising a parodic happy ending in which the improbably matched hero and heroine sail off to do battle against fascism.) In the film, Charles Boyer plays a former concert pianist who travels to 1930s England on a secret mission for the Spanish Republicans. (By the end of the war, it was perfectly safe to make anti-Franco movies.) Boyer's costar, Lauren Bacall, fresh from To Have and Have Not, plays the alcoholic daughter of a British industrialist. "Don't be melodramatic," she says at one point, "I can't stand melodrama.'' Boyer shrugs and replies, "Well, sometimes it just happens that way." And indeed the picture sometimes makes Boyer's attitude plausible. The settings are drab, the hero's ostensible allies are no more trustworthy than his enemies, and all of the actors look realistically downtrodden. George Coulouris is especially effective in the role of a Mosley-style xenophobe who has an artificial hand. Boyer, whom Greene admired for his ability to "wear worry like a habit on his forehead" (quoted in Sherry 2:16), is repeatedly subjected to sadomasochistic humiliationsas when a thug beats him up under the lights of a car while Bacall and Coulouris stand on the roadside and watch. However, the most skillfully photographed and exciting scene in the film is almost Dickensian: Boyer's only friend, a shabby but sexy young housemaid (Wanda Hendrix), is pushed from a window by two grotesque villains (Katina Paxinou and Peter Lorre). When Boyer learns of the crime, he seizes a gun and sets out for vengeance. "I've been beaten and robbed," he announces, "but that girl was murdered! And for this, someone is going to pay! "

All this changed after the war, when Greene briefly became an auteur in the British industry and was given a measure of control over the final product. The 1947 adaptation of Brighton Rock, produced by the Boulting brothers and scripted by Greene and Terence Rattigan, makes an interesting contrast to the Hollywood features I have been describing and is the picture that comes closest to the values Greene espoused in his prewar novels and criticism. Like many other crime films of the period, Brighton Rock mixes location photography with expressionistic studio sets, but its costuming and interiors resemble the 1930s French cinema or the Warner gangster cycle. It is in fact a kind of historical film, chiefly because the city of Brighton feared that Greene's depressing story might discourage tourism. To calm local officials, the producers garbed the characters in prewar costume and introduced a "crawl" explaining that contemporary Brighton had become a safe and happy playground. Brighton Rock is flawed by this gesturealso by John Boulting's uneven direction and by Hermione Baddeley's rather brassy portrayal of Ida Arnold. Because the immediate source for the screenplay was Rattigan's theatrical adaptation, the picture never achieves the subjective intensity of Greene's novel or of The Fallen Idol (1948), the noirish and highly Jamesian murder story Greene made immediately afterward with Carol Reed. And yet, it contains an effective performance by Richard Attenborough as Pinkie Browna disturbingly androgynous character whose moods alternate between Napoleonic swagger and infantile terror. It also depicts Greene's version of the Waste Land quite accurately: sunny but rather tacky images of Brighton beach are set off against sinister views of the pier at night, and the white interior of a modern luxury hotel is counterpointed with Pinkie's gangland slum, where the sound of squalling babies can be heard through open windows. Perhaps more important, Brighton Rock is the only film based on one of Greene's crime novels that emphasizes his paradoxical religious symbolism. As a result, it has one of the most unsettling conclusions of any thriller of the period.

The last scene of the picture begins with a dissolve from the black, rainswept waters of Brighton Pier, where Pinkie has fallen to his death, to a brightly lit room in a Catholic home for wayward women. Rose, accompanied by a nun, sits on the edge of a bed, wearing a shabby frock and holding a portable phonograph. "I ought to have gone with him!" she cries. "I don't want any absolution ever!" Cut to a close-up of the lipsticked nun, who speaks rather sanctimoniously about the ''appalling strangeness of the mercy of God," and who suggests that if Pinkie was capable of love he has some hope for salvation. "I'll show you!" Rose announces, and she puts her treasured record on the player. At this point, we have already seen Pinkie inside the recording booth, leaving a sadistic message: "What you want me to say is I love you. You little tramp! Why don't you go away forever and let me be?" We have also seen him unsuccessfully try to smash the record, which he realizes could be used as evidence against him in the event of Rose's death. Now we hear his voice again: "What you want me to say is I love you." Suddenly the record sticks: "I love you. I love you. I love you." As the words repeat themselves, a smiling Rose walks out of frame toward an open window, and the camera tracks forward to a cross on the wall, holding all image of the crucified Christ.

Greene later spoke about the film's conclusion as if it were a concession to the popular audience: "Anybody who wanted a happy ending would feel that they had had a happy ending" (quoted in Shelden, 345). But even if we assume that the record will always stick, the effect is anything but happy. The new version merely brings us a bit closer to the irony at the end of Heart of Darkness, where a woman is told a lie to protect her from the horrible truth. Perhaps for this reason, Brighton Rock was unsuccessful at the box officeespecially in America, where it was eventually retitled Young Scarface and treated as a gangster movie. In the years before the liberalization of censorship codes and the development of a large distribution network for art films, it was viewed as a cross between an unfashionable genre picture and a respectable literary adaptation. Variety reported that Brighton Rock had been released at a moment when Hollywood was "frowning" on stories about gangsters and that it was likely to "meet with serious objections from America's Production Code Administration." To make matters worse, its Cockney accents would be confusing to American viewers, and its religious symbolism would probably "arouse the ire of Catholics." The only selling point for the project, Variety concluded, was that it was based on a "best seller'' by Graham Greene (6 July 1947).