The Pleasure Dome – Graham Greene: The Collected Film Criticism, 1935-40

‘Four and a half years of watching films several times a week … I can hardly believe in that life of the distant thirties now, a way of life which I adopted quite voluntarily from a sense of fun.’ So begins Graham Greene’s Introduction to this collection of his film reviews for The Spectator and the distinguished, ill-fated magazine Night and Day between 1935 and 1940. During these years he was also writing such unforgettable novels as Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, and A Gun for Sale, and for readers of Graham Greene’s novels this volume carries a real bonus, revealing as much about Greene the man and his creative processes as it does about the films he writes on.

But Greene the film critic would be well worth reading even if he were not Greene the novelist as well. Here he writes on Garbo at the peak of her career, on the best of the British documentary movement, on films by Buñuel, Capra, Hitchcock, Korda, Lubitsch, Renoir, and many others. But he also relishes the cinema for itself, at its most popular; he praises the anarchic early Marx Brothers films, Fred Astaire in Top Hat, and W. C. Fields.

There are insights and quotable phrases on every page of this irresistible collection, and Greene’s asides on contemporary developments in the late 30s give an additional interest to these reviews. There are reviews of propaganda films, discussions of censorship and references to contemporary cultural events (Greene fantasises, in a 1937 review of A Day at the Races, about taking Maureen O’Sullivan to the new Surrealist Exhibition).

This collection is packed with contemporary film stills – many of them given double-page spreads – and is a delight to browse in. There is an appendix on the famous libel case following Greene’s review of Shirley Temple in Wee Willie Winkie, and Greene’s Introduction to the volume not only puts his career as a film reviewer in perspective, but also contains some splendid anecdotes.