Greene Colors in Black and White

“The world is not black and white,” wrote the British novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and critic Graham Greene (1904–91). “More like black and grey.” Greene was raised a Catholic, and his work is laced with the ironies that life in an increasingly complex and treacherous world offered those raised to religious orthodoxy. His books could certainly be lurid in detail, but they were never salacious. Although his later work wasn’t overtly tied to any specific category, a younger Greene chose to explore the rocky moral landscape of the mid-20th century through popular fiction’s most sin-friendly genre – the crime novel.In his 1949 essay, “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” the Soviet film pioneer Sergei Eisenstein acknowledged the debt that emerging narrative film owed to Charles Dickens. In “Graham Greene Noir,” a four-film compendium of movies based upon Greene’s crime writing, BAMcinématek pays tribute to a novelist whose ruthlessly brisk pacing and effortless character-driven storytelling has helped define the modern crime film and remains a strong influence to this day.Writing in the British weekly the Spectator, Greene praised director Fritz Lang’s first American picture, 1936’s “Fury,” as “the only film I know to which I wanted to attach the epithet, ‘great.'” Greene wrote that compared with Lang, “no other director is so completely the measure of his medium, is so consistently awake to the counterpoint of sound and image.” Lang’s films were to Greene, “infinitely more expert” than the films of Alfred Hitchcock, a director whose popularity, autonomy, and name above were greatly envied by Lang.It seemed like a Lang adaptation of a Greene novel would be a dream project for both men. Alas, it did not turn out that way. Under contract to Paramount, Lang agreed to direct Seton I. Miller’s script of Greene’s “Ministry of Fear” as a step toward earning his independence from the studio. A thriller in which a man, played by Ray Milland, is released from a mental hospital only to stumble across Nazi fifth columnists, “Ministry of Fear” (1944) is, perhaps ironically, the most Hitchcockian of the Viennese director’s Hollywood films. Both Lang and Greene loathed the result.As an adaptation of Greene’s novel, Miller’s script may not have been very loyal, but as a blueprint for a thriller, it was right on target. In “Ministry of Fear,” Lang’s camera brilliantly probes a series of subtly off-kilter scenes set in séances, county fairs, train compartments, and airless rooms. More than any other actor working in similar genre territory, Milland comes close to Cary Grant’s genius for telegraphing the urgency and the absurdity of his increasingly grim situation. “This Gun for Hire” (1942) was adapted from Greene’s “A Gun for Hire” by future Hollywood blacklistee Albert Maltz and American crime novelist W.R. Burnett. The ambitious Germanic high-key lighting has earned the film a regular name-check in debates about the beginnings of American film noir. But Greene’s protagonist, a loner hired killer with a personal code, has cast the longest shadow. Both Jean Pierre Melville and Michael Mann have gone to the character well of “This Gun for Hire” for their better known films “Le Samouraï” and “Heat.”Not surprisingly, BAM’s miniretro also includes Carol Reed’s “The Third Man” (1949). Producer Alexander Korda hired Greene to create “The Third Man” script from scratch. “A major character,” Greene once wrote, “has to come somehow out of the unconsciousness.” Was it an unconscious evocation of Greene’s wartime experiences working in British intelligence alongside Kim Philby that made Orson Welles’s character Harry Lime so vivid? Could it have been the author’s love-hate relationship with writing what he considered “entertainments” and hate-hate relationship with American foreign policy that were the foundation for Joseph Cotton’s character, the American dime-novelist Holly Martins?Whatever the character’s origins, the perfect three-act mousetrap story of “The Third Man” was the product of conscious research. Greene took his advance money from Korda and flew to occupied postwar Vienna. Instead of wandering through the rubble, Greene installed himself in a hotel bar. Over drinks, he chatted up soldiers from all four of the occupying forces and wove what he learned about toxic black-market penicillin, repatriation of Russian refugees, and the other grim realities of policing the divided city into the paradigmatic plot of “The Third Man.”Greene and the playwright Terrence Rattigan both adapted 1947’s “Brighton Rock” for the screen. The book is, according to the dust jacket on a paperback edition from the 1940s, “an exciting, tough, yet religious novel about a group of race course followers.” The film, as directed by Roy Boulting, is a gritty gem. Modern crime films of the Quentin Tarantino mold offer coincidence as the universe’s sole guiding principle and dooming force. “Brighton Rock” suggests that divine fate is far nastier. “You or I cannot fathom the appalling strangeness of God,” offers a nun character by way of dubious comfort. Deliverance, whether via a skipping record or a cracked banister, is inevitable in “Brighton Rock.” In the curb-level universe of Graham Greene’s underworld, God’s light shines on crook, copper, the redeemed, and the damned in equally strong shades of gray and black.Through March 30 (30 Lafayette Ave., between St. Felix Street and Ashland Place, Brooklyn 718-636-4100).

Greene Colors in Black and White

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