Nostalgic trip with Graham Greene

GRAHAM GREENE has been for me a dominant figure at many levels: as the writer of stories one cannot put down; as a Catholic novelist whose greatest work, "1 he Power and the Glory." profoundly influenced my own conversion; professionally as a film critic and screenwriter, a man for my generation, a European and a man of the cinema.
So reading The Pleasure Dome became a rewarding nostalgic journey back to the years of his film reviews in the Spectator which are collected here. As a young film journalist I watched, and still remember. nearly all the movies reviewed here.
It is always gratifying to find one's tastes and prejudices confirmed by a revered master of one's craft. So I warm to Mr. Greene's recognition of Garbo, despite his resistance to her, as -the screen's only classic?'
It is satisfactory, too. to find
Greene's instant recognition, even in such a slight debut as "Midshipman Easy," of the talent of Carol Reed who later directed Greene's two outstanding pictures, "Fallen idol" and "The Third Man."
Greene's criticism can be contemptuous of "the unAristotlean waste of this surnitic and commercial craft," as when he warns: "Such and such a film is to be carefully avoided." But his mockery of Cecil B. De Mille's evangelical epics does not blind him to the "scenes of real executive genius" in -The Crusades," or to the possibility that "The Plainsman" is "perhaps the finest Western in the history of the film."
Weekly film criticism is not meant to be read in hulk. But 1 have relished these 400-odd reviews, relished especially Mr. Greene's grasp, so rare in men of letters, of the gist of movies ... "it is so much easier to carry a story in the mind than a treatment."
This collection confirms how great a loss Mr. Greene is to the cinema. It includes a few reviews from Night and Day, the glossy magazine Mr. Greene edited too briefly. until his review of a Shirley Temple film cost the magazine a libel suit. An appendix records the verdict against them. A note suggests that the magazine foundered . . "more because of its too highbrow tone" than as a result of the case.
But it is interesting to speculate how different Graham Greene's career might have been, had he remained the editor of a fashionable magazine with such distinguished critics a s Elizabeth Bowen on the theatre; Evelyn Waugh on books; and on movies of course Mr. Greene himself -surely the most distinguished author to practise at the same time as a professional film critic.
Freda Bruce Lorkhatt