Readers of pgwp know of my ongoing obsession with Graham Greene—I’ve been working my way through his bibliography for the better part of 2007—but did you also know that I’m equally obsessed with Alfred Hitchcock? Slowly but surely I’ve been watching all of his movies—not in order, though one day I’d like to. So you can imagine I was quite excited by AMC’s “7 Nights of Hitchcock” last week. I was able to catch many that I hadn’t seen before (Saboteur, Marnie, Frenzy, and Torn Curtain) as well as revel in my old favorites (among others, Vertigo and Rear Window—by the way, I have a similar must-see-everything obsession with Jimmy Stewart).
I’ve been thinking about both Greene and Hitchcock together lately. The more Greene novels I read, the more I think Hitch might have done something great with one of them. I’ve already noted that the atmosphere of The Man Within reminded me of Jamaica Inn, an early Hitchcock (made in 1939, ten yeas after The Man Within was published). Likewise Orient Express was positively cinematic in its execution—and I don’t think it takes much effort to imagine that Hitchcock could have made a fantastic mystery-on-a-train with that material.
Wishful thinking aside, many of Greene’s “entertainments” really do seem to have very Hitchcockian plots. A Gun for Sale, for instance, is about a hired killer who is exposed by the very people who hired him, so he’s on the run from the cops while hunting the “real” criminals down—looking for personal justice but also uncovering more nefarious plans. Of course, a beautiful woman gets involved, and the novel reaches its climax during a town-wide safety drill which requires every citizen to wear gas masks. It’s a brilliant set piece Hitchcock could have had a blast with. (Instead, it was butchered in the 1942 noir This Gun for Hire, which transplanted the action from England to California and from a small town filled with gas-masked citizens to an employee drill in a Los Angeles factory. How a director could reject the opportunity to show a young paperboy riding his bike up a desolate street, wearing a gas mask, I'll never understand.)
But apparently Greene thought Hitchcock was tremendously overrated. Greene actually met Hitchcock while Hitch was making Sabotage—a movie based on Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, which is possibly noteworthy since Conrad was one of Greene’s favorite novelists, and The Secret Agent influenced Greene's own writing. According to Norman Sherry's biography, Greene wrote his brother Hugh,
I had to see Hitchcock, the other day... A silly harmless clown. I shuddered at the things he told me he was doing to Conrad's Secret Agent.
Upon the movie's release, as a film critic for The Spectator, he elaborated on his feelings for the director:
His films consist of a series of small “amusing” melodramatic situations: the murderer’s button dropped on the baccarat board; the strangled organist’s hands prolonging the notes in the empty church; the fugitives hiding in the bell-tower when the bell begins to swing. Very perfunctorily he builds up to these tricky situations (paying no attention on the way to inconsistencies, loose ends, psychological absurdities) and then drops them: they mean nothing: they lead to nothing.
Greene apparently found Hitchcock’s lack of subtlety to be akin to a lack of real talent. There’s no real arguing that many of Hitchcock’s movies are designed to end in stunning set pieces—look no further than North by Northwest, the entire plot of which was apparently written with the express purpose of reaching its climax atop Mount Rushmore. Yet the same could be said for A Gun For Sale—let's face it: filling a town with men, women, and children in gas masks is no more of a "'tricky situation" than hanging Cary Grant from George Washington's nose. It's obviously an image devised at the expense of naturalistic plot.
It's too bad, because I really can't think of a novelist and filmmaker better suited for each other. And perhaps their similarities are no accident. Their careers both started in the 1920s and lasted into the 1970s, and they both hit their creative and commercial peaks at the exact same time. On one level or another, it’s quite possible that Greene influenced Hitchcock, despite Greene’s own dislike of the director’s work. Indeed, at some point—I assume in the early 1960s, shortly after the novel’s release—Hitchcock apparently tried to get the rights to A Burnt-Out Case, but Greene wouldn’t allow it, according to this Times article from the 1980s:
“I have not got all that much admiration for Hitchcock. He was offering a rather derisory sum and announced that he had bought it so I said no,” Mr Greene confessed.
Assuming that had happened in the early 60s, and compounded by Greene’s reviews of Hitchcock’s early films, it might explain Hitchcock’s awkwardly mum answers to questions by Bryan Forbes in this interview from 1967:
BF: Am I right in saying that you have never worked with Graham Greene?
AH: No. Never.
BF: Do you regret that?
AH: I don't know. It's very hard to say until you put the thing into practice. It's very difficult to tell.
BF: I think he has so many affinities with you that I'd love to see you two come together.
AH: Yes.
BF: I think he's such a superb craftsman.
AH: Oh yes, he is.
BF: And he writes on the page. He visualises so well. All his sentences just grip you. I'd love to bring you together. If you ever come to ABC, it's you and Graham Greene.
AH: Right. Good.
Based on such taciturn answers, it's hard to really know what Hitchcock thought of Greene—though he had to have known what Greene thought of him.
Watching Psycho this weekend, however, I couldn’t help but see a connection. Psycho is, incidentally, one of my least favorite Hitchcock movies; I think it’s terrifically overrated, except for the one specific thing the movie is hailed for—Hitchcock’s move to set Janet Leigh up as the protagonist, only to kill her off in the first act and flip the story to follow Anthony Perkins. It’s an ingenious move—and by the way, one that Greene had already done at least twice in his novels. Most explicitly is Brighton Rock, which from page one seems to be about Hale, a reporter who immediately realizes he is being hunted in Brighton. He meets a nameless boy early on who threatens his life, then disappears. The rest of the chapter is all Hale, looking for a way to evade the mobsters gradually surrounding him. He befriends a woman, Ida, so that he won’t be found alone. It all seems like the classic setup for a Greene entertainment—or, for that matter, a Hitchcock flick—until Ida wanders off to the bathroom and Hale is never heard from again. From chapter two onward, the book belongs to that boy, Pinkie, the villain—just as Psycho belongs to Norman Bates. Greene employed the same trick (though in a less sinister fashion) in The Power and the Glory, which begins as if it will be about Mr. Tench, the dentist. The first chapter is his star turn, as he looks out at the pier and wiles away his time in desolate southern Mexico. Like Hale, he encounters a nameless man—this time a priest—who quickly disappears. When chapter two begins, it’s the priest, not Tench, who the cameras, as it were, have chosen to follow.
Hitchcock’s film is regarded as a classic in large part because he dared to do something that hadn’t been done in film before (actually, Antonioni’s L’Avventura does the same thing, but it came out the same year as Psycho so couldn’t have been an influence), but it’s precisely something Greene had dared to do in fiction, more than once, more than twenty years earlier.
Ultimately I find it downright bewildering that Greene and Hitchcock never came together. Greene's distaste for Hitchcock is particularly strange given his own willingness to write what he called "entertainments," as opposed to those works he felt had more literary aspirations. He clearly wasn't too good to write novels that hinged on gunplay and chorus girls rather than larger, philosophical themes, and he was certainly not above cashing a paycheck. To know that there was even a glimmer of a chance in the 1960s for Hitchcock to actually make a film based on one of Greene's novels is all the worse. Greene has gone on record as being disappointed by most of his film adaptations, including those by filmmakers he admired (see Otto Preminger's The Human Factor). Who knows: maybe Hitchcock would've been just what Green was looking for.
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