This week I watched films based on Graham Greene novels. I’ve always had mixed feelings about Graham Greene as an author. Make no mistake, he’s very good, but he tends to be a little too cynical even by my snarky standards, and also… I feel like a hypocrite saying this, but there are times where I have issues with his criticism of American policy. It’s not that I don’t agree with him or not, or think such criticism is undeserved, it’s just that he has a way of twisting the knife in such a way I briefly turn into a flag-waving jingoist even when I agree with him. It’s still good stuff so let’s get on with it.
The first film on my list, Carol Reed’s The Third Man tells the story of Holly Martins ( Joseph Cotten) a hack writer who has excepted an invitation from his good friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) to come to Vienna for a job. Postwar Vienna is currently controlled by five countries, with five different police forces. It’s just as insane as it sounds, and because of that corruption runs rampant with nearly all of the economy coming from the black market. When Holly arrives at Harry’s apartment he finds out that Harry was killed in an accident just hours before.
Later, at Harry’s funeral a British official, Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), tells him that Harry was a notorious black marketer and probably was murdered. Calloway gives Holly a plane ticket and advises him to go home.
Despite Calloway’s warning, Holly goes on the quest in a city he does not understand or speak the language to find out who killed his friend and to clear his good name. However, nothing is as it appears.
Technically third man is not an adaptation of Greene’s novel. Like Arthur C. Clarke’s later 2001 he wrote the prose version as a starting off point for his script and the novel came out a couple of years later.
I won’t allow a technicality me to take away a reason to watch one of the great film classics. This is almost a perfect film. Carol Reed does an amazing job with his plotting and camera use. Vienna is so amazing it’s almost a Character onto itself one, one that you cannot believe is real and not something brilliant set designers created from their imagination. Also Welles steals the show as Harry Lime with barely 8 minutes of screen time.
The next film on my list but human factor tells the story of Maurice Castle (Nicol Williamson) a career company man in British Intelligence . He lives a boring routine nine to five job working the Africa desk, commuting to his country flat where he lives with his African wife Sarah (Iman), and son, Sam, and reading novels… that he always buys two of. At work there is a security crackdown. Management has found evidence of a mole. They have decided to locate the traitor and dispose of him. The obvious candidate is Maurice’s coworker, Arthur Davis (Derek Jacobi) a fun loving playboy. The problem is Arthur isn’t the traitor… Maurice is.
I was looking forward to watching this one. It had an all-star cast with Otto Preminger behind the camera and a script by Tom Stoppard and Richard Attenborough, Derek Jacobi, John Gielgud and of course Nicol Williamson in the cast what could go wrong?
Regrettably, I found it slow paced and dry as toast and something that felt like a made for television drama. It’s also as cynical and depressing as anything by Greene I’ve encountered yet… I’m afraid I was not it’s target audience.
