Cinematic legacy

With the centenary of the seminal author's birth on Saturday, the world is going Graham Greene mad at the moment, sparking off a number of celebrations.

At the weekend, BBC 4 showed four significant Graham Greene films.

There is a fully fledged Greene festival going on at this moment in his home town of Berkhamsted, with 17 speakers including Greene's official biographer Norman Sherry, writer Sir John Mortimer and Greene's niece Louise Dennys.

And, last month, Bradford's National Museum of Photography put on a Greene movie festival which included three Greene-based films, including The Comedians, Monsignor Quixote and The Third Man, introduced with a lecture by Quentin Falk, and one of the Shades of Greene dramatisations of short stories transmitted by Thames Television in 1975.

So perhaps this is an opportune time to re-evaluate this complex and, in many ways, contradictory giant of 20th-century literature.

Frank Tuttle's 1942 movie This Gun for Hire was based on Greene's 1936 novel A Gun For Sale and, while the ambiguously happy ending that John Boulting tagged on to his 1947 film version of Brighton Rock distorted the Catholic angst of the original novel, the power of both books and movies was unmistakable.

Later, works like Our Man in Havana, The Quiet American and The Comedians caused the CIA to place him under surveillance. While in Cuba, Greene spent the early hours of the day conversing with Fidel Castro.

When he filmed The Quiet American in 1958, Joseph L Mankiewicz managed to turn it into an anti-communist tract and Greene campaigned against the film's release in Britain.

Phillip Noyce's 2002 remake is nearer to the original, though, in a strange way, Michael Redgrave gets closer to the essence of Greene's Fowler, the jaded British reporter, than Michael Caine in the later version.

As a Catholic with a long-standing adulterous affair driving him into the confessional week after week - though perhaps not, since Greene described himself as Catholic agnostic - problems of sexual morality loomed large in works like The End of the Affair and added a complex subtext to the more overtly political works like The Quiet American.

One of the delightful discoveries of the Bradford season was Monsignor Quixote, a Thames TV production from 1985, starring Alec Guinness as a priestly descendant of Cervantes's great satirical hero, Leo McKern as his best friend, a local communist nicknamed Sancho and the Bishop of Motopo Ian Richardson, who gets the humble priest promoted to a monsignor, much to his discomfiture.

McKern is in his best Rumpole form, though, like many fictional reds, he doesn't seem to have any party comrades to question his decision when he pulls out of local politics in fury at having lost the mayoral elections.

The warmth between the monsignor and his Sancho could be read as an allegory of the relationship between Greene's Catholicism and his sympathy with progressive causes.

Clearly, like Brecht's Mother Courage, one cannot entirely condemn or admire him.

Aficionados tend to hail The Third Man as the best British noir and it certainly appropriates noir cliches, like the huge shadows thrown by the brute lights onto the walls and the tilted camera angles.

But it lacks the terrible inevitability of tragedy, which distinguished Hollywood noir and borrowed from the German expressionist cinema of auteurs like Fritz Lang, who fled Hitler's Germany.

We don't know what's going to happen to Harry Lime. Nor do we care.

We rather hope that Alida Valli ends up in the arms of Holly Martin. She nearly does.

But, thanks to Greene's second thoughts, that long final shot of her walking to camera and past Martins without even acknowledging the existence of her lover's killer is now as powerful - and as famous - as the long opening sequence of A Touch of Evil.

Nor does the film give as accurate a picture of four-power-controlled Vienna as the Swiss-made Die Vier im Jeep (Four in a Jeep), two years later, a much more humanistic film.

In the end, however, the film bears the mark of Kane, for, while he only appears about three-quarters of the way through, Welles effectively hijacked it.

As we know from Pinky in Brighton Rock, Greene is good at portraying the way that even his most amoral characters can torture themselves.

But there is no such deeper dimension to Welles's Lime.

And, as for that famous cuckoo clock speech on the ferris wheel, it's doubtful that even Welles himself really believed it.

Greene's true cinematic legacy rests on Brighton Rock, The Fallen Idol - for some reason neglected in all these celebrations - The Comedians and, of course, The Quiet American, a film that is as topical today as a US helicopter gunship hovering over Fallujah.

KARL DALLAS