Tag: Graham Greene

The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

The Ministry of Fear, Graham Greene’s 1943 spy thriller set during the London blitz always seems to be underrated. There could be several reasons for that. It is one of the novels that he subtitled as “an entertainment”, which is always a problematic description with his work, and an invitation to take the book less than seriously. Greene is normally thought of as a realist but the tone here is quite odd, as if the physical displacement of the blitz has caused a psychic shock as well.  

Everything is seen from the point of view of the main character Arthur Rowe, who is himself a damaged person. We gradually learn that he was responsible for the “mercy killing” of his sick wife and served some sort of sentence for it, although whether in a prison or a hospital we are not quite sure. He carries a weight of guilt about with him because of this.

Rowe’s mind moves between the reality of the blitz, his dreams, and his childhood memories. This theme of nostalgia for childhood is introduced right at the beginning,  at a charity fête taking place in a square in bombed-out Bloomsbury. It is because the stalls remind Rowe of his past that he is drawn to the fair and it is at the “guess the weight of the cake” stall that he stumbles into a dark world of espionage. He has guessed correctly and won the cake, but it becomes apparent that it was intended that the cake should go to someone else. The stall was in fact a front for a network of fifth-columnists who have been blackmailed into spying for the Germans. This atmosphere of threat and coercion into spying is “the ministry of fear”. The Nazis have imposed it all over continental Europe and now it has come to London.    

From this point on, the plot becomes very complicated quite quickly. Rowe attempts to contact the organisers of the fair to put things right, but finds himself in a sort of living nightmare. After what appears to be a murder at a séance he becomes a hunted man, fearing that his past will make him the obvious suspect. There was something valuable to the spies in the cake and an attempt is made on his life. This is prevented by the lucky fall of a bomb nearby.   

The narrative takes an abrupt turn, when, after another explosion, the scene switches to a mysterious clinic, where a man called Digby is a patient with amnesia. We slowly realise that Digby is Rowe, who has forgotten most of his adult life and seems far happier living with his memories of the world before the war. Then we find out that the doctor running the clinic was at the séance, his assistant is the man who tried to kill Rowe, and the plot starts to move towards its conclusion. 

A clue as to how we should read the novel is that Rowe is described as follows: “He felt directed, controlled, moulded by some agency with a surrealist imagination.” Indeed, the strange atmosphere of the blitz as rendered here rather calls to mind G K Chesterton’s fantastic vision of London in The Man Who Was Thursday. There is a vein of the absurd running through The Ministry of Fear, for example when we are told after an air raid that “a man with a grey dusty face leant against a wall and laughed and a warden said sharply, ‘That’s enough now. It’s nothing to laugh about.’”

It is these vivid descriptions of London in the blitz that linger in the mind. “Most of the church spires seemed to have been snapped off two-thirds up like sugar-sticks and there was an appearance of slum clearance where there hadn’t really been any slums.”  Apart from its place in the context of Greene’s writing, it deserves to be remembered as one of the creative works recording the blitz for posterity, such as the photographs of Bill Brandt or the paintings of Graham Sutherland.

In Search of The Third Man by Charles Drazin

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

The Third Man was a huge success when it came out in 1949, and has been regarded as a classic film ever since. This story of disillusionment and betrayal in a shattered and divided post-war Vienna has become part of the culture and over the years has been referred to in many other films, books and TV series. The title itself has entered the language, helped by its association with the Cambridge spies and Kim Philby’s denial that he was “the third man”. Indeed, it has been suggested that Graham Greene had his former intelligence boss Philby in mind when he wrote the character of Harry Lime.

It’s a measure of the impact of The Third Man that there is a museum devoted to the film in Vienna. There are even guided tours of the Vienna sewers, where the film’s dramatic climax takes place. In Search of The Third Man by Charles Drazin was published in 1999 for the film’s fiftieth anniversary.    

The circumstances of the making of the film have almost become a myth. Part of the reason for this is that it was brought to the screen by three high-profile creative artists. Over the years, Graham Greene, Orson Welles and Carol Reed gave their own versions of the making of the film. Each had their reasons for embellishing the facts or suppressing inconvenient truths.

Drazin goes back to primary sources to get behind these accounts, to establish the truth about the film, and in the process to explain how and why the myths became accepted as the truth in the first place.

For example, when the film was made, Carol Reed was regarded as one of the world’s great film directors, whereas Welles’ reputation was rather in the doldrums. Over the years, this position reversed itself, so it became easy for people to believe the claims that Welles had directed whole sections of the film himself. Drazin confirms once and for all that Welles’ only contribution beyond his acting was the famous “cuckoo clock” speech.

Appropriately, for a story that is so concerned with the difference between appearance and reality, it turns out that nothing is quite as it seems in this film. While watching it, you would assume that it was all filmed on location in Vienna, yet many shots were filmed in the studio back in England, and then knitted together seamlessly with the location footage by director Carol Reed. And it is assistant director Guy Hamilton’s looming shadow rather than Orson Welles’ that Joseph Cotton chases.

Drazin identifies how the theme of betrayal, so prominent here, runs through all Graham Greene’s writing. He explores in detail just how and why Greene might have based Lime on aspects of Philby’s early life. He suggests that Reed’s approach as a director was peculiarly in sympathy with the tone of Greene’s writing.

He also establishes that filmmaking is a collaborative process and the success of a film can never be wholly attributed to the work of only one or two individuals. There is a sort of mysterious alchemy about the whole process, and a certain amount of luck. The Third Man was one of those rare occasions in cinema when everything just aligned the right way, as if it was meant to happen like that. Yet a good deal of that luck could be put down to the creative intuition of Carol Reed and Drazin sees The Third Man as his film, more than anyone else’s. For example, it was Reed who tracked down the unknown zither player Anton Karas and insisted that his music should be used, rather than an orchestral score as was normal at the time.

Several people who worked on The Third Man in a junior capacity, and who are interviewed here, went on to great things. John Hawkesworth was later responsible for the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes TV series and Guy Hamilton directed several James Bond films, as well as the Len Deighton adaptation, Funeral in Berlin.

This is a thoroughly well-researched, highly readable and enjoyable book, essential reading for anyone who loves the film. Sometimes, a “behind the scenes” book can lessen one’s enjoyment of a film. That is not the case here. Knowing the difficulties behind the production makes the film even more fascinating.        

Welles almost didn’t play the part of Harry Lime. Another actor prevaricated for so long about accepting the part that he had to be dropped from the production. Yet would we find the film so compelling today if it had been Cary Grant standing in that doorway?