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ArtScene: Graham Greene Season

TONY’S CHOICES
The Third Man leads a Graham Greene season at Bradford’s NMPFT.
By Vic Allen

It’s depressing. The Head of Film Programming at Bradford’s NMPFT always knows a little more about film than we do. He even beats us to the punchline. “There has only ever been one perfect film…” we start to say, and Tony Earnshaw cuts in with the speed of snapping celluloid: “…The Third Man”. And he’s right. Bastard.

Bradford’s NMPFT is celebrating Graham Greene’s birth centenary with a Third Man foyer display, a series of his films, and eventually a Lumière Lecture by the author of Travels in Greeneland, Quentin Falk. It all begins on July 20 with The Comedians. Tony is a Richard Burton fanatic, but presumably he wouldn’t list this rather dour effort as the ‘second-best’ ever Greene adaptation. So what is? This Gun for Hire?

Now Greene – a disciple of Adler (that’s Alfred, not Larry) – would have relished the bloke-ish powerplay that made us both spurn the ‘obvious’ choices of Brighton Rock or The Fallen Idol. And after trumping us repeatedly with his recondite knowledge of TV adaptations (…did you know that Michael Rennie, the TV Harry Lime, was born in Knaresborough?) Tony settles on Went the Day Well?: a kind of prototype for Jack Higgins’s The Eagle Has Landed. “It’s from a short story called The Lieutenant Died Last. It was made as an English propaganda film in 1942, yet starts with a ‘post-war’ scene in a churchyard. It even has the line ‘when Hitler got his…’,” blahs Tony.

Greene’s influence on cinema is exceptional, even now. Not only have we just had The End of the Affair and The Quiet American, but a discussion on his short story The Destructors crops up in the feted Donnie Darko. “The screenplays are so intelligent. You have to be a very, very poor director not to make something out of it,” says Tony.

Okay. So which was the WORST Greene adaptation, then? “I’m not a fan of the original version of The Quiet American with Audie Murphy and Michael Redgrave,” says Tony (we’ve not seen either version, of course).

What about The Ministry of Fear, we mew? “I’m quite fond of that. It was directed by Fritz Lang,” says Tony. Lang never did anything really bad. How embarrassing; we’re thinking of something else. You know? The film by that bald director. Tony wheels out an egg box of names. But not the guy we’re thinking of. Come on! The one who made Anatomy of a Murder. “Otto Preminger? He didn’t do a Greene film”. We thought he had. “I’ll look him up… nope. There’s nothing here”. Mmm. It would be sometime in the ‘70s. “Such Good Friends”, Tony intones. “Rosebud, The Human Factor…” That’s it! Duff book. Lousy, lousy film; and the worst trailer ever made.

And then it strikes us. We knew a film that Tony Earnshaw hadn’t heard of! “You’ve ruined my career in your final magazine!” wails Tony.

Eh, well. As Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus said: ‘It is a comfort to have others in your misery’. Only he said it in Latin.

• This feature by Vic Allen originally appeared in the last-ever issue of the Yorkshire listings magazine Artscene (July/Aug 2004). (© Vic Allen, 2004)