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

38. Graham Greene, The Pleasure Dome: Collected Film Criticism, 19351940, ed. John Russell Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 5. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

39. For a discussion of poetic realism as a critical term, see Dudley Andrew, Mists of Regret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), especially 1117. See also his discussion of Greene and the French cinema, 25557.

40. Red Harvest inspired Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961) and Sergio Leone's Fistful of Dollars (1971). The Coen brothers used it as one of the sources for Miller's Crossing (1990), as did Walter Hill for The Last Man Standing (1996). In 1982, shortly after Chinatown had created a vogue for period movies about private detectives, Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci attempted to film Red Harvest in Hollywood. The picture was never produced, but Bertolucci's script, written with Marilyn Goldin, was impressive. The early scenes powerfully evoke the horrors of Personville, viewing them through the eyes of the Continental Op as he arrives in town. The hellish streets are enveloped in smoke, and a blade of fire spurs up an alley, running along the walls "in crazy patterns like a wild animal." Bill Quint, the Wobbly organizer, explains to the Op that the smoke and fire originate in one of the old mining tunnels nearby: "Fifteen years of discussion," he says. "Who's going to put it outthe city or the state or the mining company or the Federal Government? Meanwhile, the fire's still goingburning houses, putting families in the street, poisoning people." At the end of the film, after the Op destroys a band of gangsters and discovers the identity of a murderer, the fire still burns, and even though occupied by the National Guard, the streets look as depressing as ever. On a train out of town, the Op finds himself sitting across from the brutal capitalist Elihu Willsson, who remarks, "I'm not going to let a man like you get away from me. . . . I want you to run for governor." (Unpublished screenplay by Bernardo Bertolucci and Marilyn Goldin, June 1982, Lilly Library manuscripts collection, Bloomington, Indiana.)

41. T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), 183. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

42. George Orwell later wrote of Greene, "He appears to share the idea, which has been floating around ever since Baudelaire, that there is something rather distingué in being damned; Hell is a sort of high-class nightclub, entry to which is reserved for Catholics only" (quoted in Shelden, Graham Greene, 350). For a commentary on how Brighton Rock was appropriated by a later subculture, see Niel Nehring, "Revolt into Style: Graham Greene Meets the Sex Pistols," PMLA 106, no. 2 (March 1991): 22237.

43. Graham Greene, Brighton Rock (New York: Viking Press, 1967), 58. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

44. Norman Sherry has suggested that Ida Arnold was modeled on Mae West, whose films greatly amused Greene (Sherry, Life of Graham Greene, 1:63536). But the name ' 'Arnold" also points to Matthew Arnold, a liberal humanist whom T. S. Eliot described as an "undergraduate" in philosophy and a "philistine" in religion (Eliot, "Matthew Arnold," in Selected Prose, 165).

45. A Gun for Sale was published in America as This Gun for Hire. Throughout this chapter, I use the British title of the novel in order to distinguish it from the film adaptation.

46. Like the novel, the film gives a "psychoanalytic" and sociological interpretation of Raven, who has witnessed the hanging of his father, the suicide of his mother, and the horrors of an orphanage. Alan Ladd alludes to these experiences in a slightly mad speech to Veronica Lake as the two are hiding out from the police in an abandoned railway yarda scene clearly influenced by radical scriptwriter Albert Maltz. His worst memory, however, seems to be of a cruel stepmother who broke his wrist with an iron.

47. The Ministry of Fear was directed by Fritz Lang, a great admirer of Greene's novel, who tried unsuccessfully to purchase the rights for himself. When Lang saw the studio's script (by Seton I. Miller, an alumnus of Warner Brothers in the 1930s), he tried to escape his contract (Peter Bogdanovich, Fritz Lang in America [New York: Praeger, 1969], 65). The completed picture is in fact significantly different from the novel. In Greene's version, the scruffy protagonist has just been released from prison for the mercy-killing of his wife; in the film, this character is a handsome fellow (Ray Milland) who is judged innocent of the killing. Paramount also fails to achieve anything like Greene's phantasmagoric descriptions of London during the blitz. The best moments are the scenes of violent action, which are staged and photographed in perversely witty fashion.

48. In Greene's novelized version of the story, Harry Lime is a surprisingly ordinary fellow (just as Kurtz is surprisingly small when Marlow discovers him in the jungle). By contrast, Welles is so compelling that he later became the star of a radio series in which Harry Lime was the hero.

49. "It won't do, boys. . . . It's sheer buggery," David Selznick told Carol Reed and Greene when he read the script of the movie. Greene later joked about Selznick's remark (Greene, The Pleasure Dome, 3). But in fact the relationship between Martins and Lime seems far more intense than schoolboy loyalty.

50. There are many differences between Greene's published novella and the film. In the novella, for example, the story is narrated by the British officer Callaway. The American and British versions of the film are also different: the American print contains a brief opening narration by Joseph Cotten, whereas the British print is narrated by Carol Reed. As Greene pointed out, Welles was responsible for Lime's famous speech about Italy and Switzerland; other uncredited writers for the film included Peter Smolka and Mabbie Poole. According to Joseph Cotten, Carol Reed improvised the ending to the film on the last day of shooting (see Joseph Cotten, Vanity Will Get You Somewhere [San Francisco: Mercury House, 1987], 9798). In the British version, the closing shot runs much longer than in the American version, which was shortened by David Selznick in accordance with Hollywood practice.

51. In The Ministry of Fear, Greene describes the difference between childhood and adult reading:

In childhood we live under the brightness of immortality heaven is as near and actual as the seaside. Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock. Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhoodfor those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience.

52. Ivan Moffat, "On the Fourth Floor of Paramount: Interview with Billy Wilder," in The World of Raymond Chandler, ed. Miriam Gross (New York: A and W Publishers, 1977), 49.

53. PCA report, December 1, 1943, Margaret Herrick Library of the Motion Picture Academy, Los Angeles.

54. Two of Cain's hard-boiled stories had been filmed in Hollywood prior to this time. She Made Her Bed (Paramount, 1934), starring Richard Arlen, was a loose adaptation of his famous satire of California road culture, "The Baby in the Icebox." Money and the Woman (Warner Brothers, 1940), starring Jeffrey Lynn, was a B-budget version of Cain's novella of the same title and might be described as a sentimental precursor of Double Indemnity.