André Bazin and Graham Greene (and Alfred Hitchcock): Some Points of Contact

Bazin would always harbor reservations about The Third Man, but, due to that film, Greene’s presence would continue to loom large in discussions of Orson Welles, who was, of course, an enormously inspiring figure for Bazin the theorist (and for 1950s French film culture in general). During the 1950s, Greene also haunts French critical discussions of Alfred Hitchcock’s merits: how seriously should he be taken as an artist? To what extent and under what circumstances can thrillers be considered serious art? Greene is an important reference in such discussions. His fiction also becomes a key exhibit in arguments about the cinema having influenced modern English-language literature. Before his very premature death in 1958 (at 40), Bazin – an enormously vital presence in postwar French film culture – would make important contributions on all these topics.

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André Bazin and Graham Greene: why bring them together in an article? The reasons for pairing up the British writer and the French film critic may not be immediately obvious. However, there are a number of intriguing links between them.

According to Bazin, he met Greene once in 1949. It was in Biarritz, at the “Festival du film maudit.” Bazin was one of the initiators of the festival, which also benefitted from the patronage of people like Jean Cocteau, Orson Welles, Robert Bresson, Raymond Queneau, and Claude Mauriac. In a light-hearted note on the festival, written for Le Parisien libéré, Bazin told an anecdote about the encounter between Greene and Mauriac, whom the British guest apparently took for his father, François Mauriac, and congratulated for looking so young.1

The year before had seen the publication of Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory (1940) in French, with an introduction by Mauriac père, who was very respected at the time as a novelist and Catholic intellectual (he would go on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1952). The British Catholic novelist would later credit Mauriac’s introduction for the book’s success in France.2 Himself a Catholic, André Bazin seems to have been greatly taken with La Puissance et la gloire, and almost personally offended by its 1947 Hollywood adaptation, John Ford’s The Fugitive (French title Dieu est mort), which he seems to have seen around the same time he discovered the novel. He would review The Fugitive in 1948,3, and he would return to it now and then, for a passing swipe, variously indicting it as an “odious betrayal,”4 a “sumptuous betrayal,”5 or a de luxe cinematic equivalent of the Catholic consumerism associated with the religious shops around the Parisian church of Saint-Sulpice.6 As for the novel itself, Bazin will never discuss it directly (except in his review of Ford’s film), but, as we’ll see, his reading of it informs a major essay on cinema and theology that he published in 1951.

At the time Bazin met Greene in Biarritz, the latter’s most recent novel was The Heart of the Matter (1948), which had brought him unprecedented success in the UK and the USA. Bazin would have to wait until 1950 for a French translation. However, in 1948-49, Greene was also riding a big wave of film-related success. In August 1948, Bazin had reported from the Venice Film Festival, where Greene’s screenplay for Carol Reed’s The Fallen Idol (adapted from a short story of his) had received an award. (It would go on to also earn an Oscar nomination.). Upon the film’s French release (under the title Première désillusion) a few months later, Bazin gave it a positive review. (Première désillusion was in release when Greene visited the “Festival du film maudit,”) He was even more enthusiastic about John Boulting’s 1948 film version of Greene’s Brighton Rock (with a screenplay by Greene himself and Terence Rattigan), also released in France in 1949 (with a dramatically uninspired title, Le gang des tueurs); “this modest British film” would actually remain Bazin’s favorite Greene adaptation.7 Reed’s 1949 The Third Man, which of course would make a far bigger splash than either, was still unreleased in July 1949, when Greene told Bazin in Biarritz that of all the films with which he had been associated, it was the one by which he felt “least betrayed.”8

Bazin would always harbor reservations about The Third Man, but, due to that film, Greene’s presence would continue to loom large in discussions of Orson Welles, who was, of course, an enormously inspiring figure for Bazin the theorist (and for 1950s French film culture in general). During the 1950s, Greene also haunts French critical discussions of Alfred Hitchcock’s merits: how seriously should he be taken as an artist? To what extent and under what circumstances can thrillers be considered serious art? Greene is an important reference in such discussions. His fiction also becomes a key exhibit in arguments about the cinema having influenced modern English-language literature. Before his very premature death in 1958 (at 40), Bazin – an enormously vital presence in postwar French film culture – would make important contributions on all these topics.

Greene had also been a film critic for pre-war London papers (and, though not as committed as Bazin, nor as theoretically inclined, he had been far from a dilettante), and in the era of The Fallen Idol he still considered himself a man of the cinema. As for the affinities between his Catholicism and Bazin’s, the French critic commented in a review of The Heart of the Matter (not the novel but George More O’Ferrall’s undistinguished film version from 1953) that his “tragic sense of Christianity is close enough to our own Pascalian tradition.”9 Like Bazin, Greene was a left-wing Catholic. The phrase “Catholic dissident,” used by Angela Dalle Vacche to describe Bazin,10 very easily applies to Greene, whose The Power and the Glory – a martyr narrative (set in anticlerical Mexico) in which the martyred priest is constantly drunk and has also fathered a child with one of his parishioners – had been the object of censorhip investigations by Rome’s Holy Office.11

The Power and the Glory

Graham Greene. Licensed under fair use via Wikipedia.

The version of Catholicism that Greene engages with in his fiction is, famously, one that scorns all easy consolation. Anguish is foregrounded. (In the post-war years, Christian anguish over God – or His absence – suddenly enjoyed a sort of vogue in Western culture. Greene’s novels – which hadn’t sold particularly well during the previous decade – fed this vogue and benefitted from it. Another contributor was Ingmar Bergman.) As Angela Dalle Vacche reminds us, Bazin, too, called for a religious cinema that would not “reduce religion to simple moral or social propaganda, and the cinema to the level of its instrument.”12 One of the religious films praised by Bazin in that era is Augusto Genina’s 1949 Heaven over the Marshes (Cielo sulla palude or, to use its French title, La Fille des marais). This Italian film tells the story of Maria Goretti (1890-1902), a peasant girl who died at age 12, stabbed by a boy after rejecting his sexual advances, and was canonized in 1950. Writing in 1951 for Cahiers du cinéma, Bazin praises Genina’s film for being “a hagiography that doesn’t prove anything, above all not the sainthood of the saint. Herein lies not only the film’s artistic distinction but also its religious one. Heaven over the Marshes is a rarity: a good Catholic film.” Genina’s neorealist treatment of Maria Goretti’s story not only rejects “all the ornament that comes with the subject matter – the religious symbolism and, it goes without saying, the supernatural element of traditional hagiographies”; it amounts to “a systematic refusal not only to treat sainthood as anything but a fact, an event occurring in the world, but also to consider it from any point of view other than the external one. He looks at sainthood from the outside, as the ambiguous manifestation of a spiritual reality that is absolutely impossible to prove.”13 In The Power and the Glory, Greene, too, takes a polemical stance toward hagiographic kitsch. He includes parodies of the genre, thus highlighting the fact that what he himself is doing with his tale of a martyred priest is vastly different. Needless to say, Greene had nothing but scorn for John Ford’s “pious film,” which “gave all the integrity to the priest and all the corruption to the lieutenant” who is hunting him; in the adaptation, it is the lieutenant – not the priest – who has fathered an illegitimate child.14 Bazin shared this scorn: “A truly Catholic novel has been turned into an edifying story.” The novel (which Bazin wrongly believes to be set in the 19th century) is about the power of the sacrament. As Bazin explains, Greene’s priest is cowardly and not very pious. He would rather flee the country, or accommodate to civil life by taking a wife, than die for breaking the anticlerical laws. He doesn’t believe his death could be of any use to God and the Church. He cannot conceive of his martyrdom as anything but a joke – the death of a drunken, lecherous priest. Still, the sacrament – his having been ordained to turn bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ – wouldn’t let him quit. “Almost in spite of himself, it compels him to keep doing his duty and it drives him towards martyrdom.” By ridding the priest (played in the film by Henry Fonda) of his drunkenness and his sexual transgression, by turning him into a good man who’s only somewhat weak, Ford has transformed an authentically Catholic drama (grounded in the mystery of the sacrament) into the kind of Catholic propaganda that Bazin (just like Greene) abhors, calling it “du Saint-Sulpice cinématographique de luxe.”

The Fugitive. Editor’s collection.

In the essay “Cinema and Theology,” Bazin points to a film that in his view comes closer to Greene’s The Power and the Glory than Ford’s direct adaptation. The film is Jean Delannoy’s God Needs Men (Dieu a besoin des hommes), based on a 1945 novel by Henri Queffélec, Un recteur de L’Île de Sein. Bazin retells the plot in some detail. It concerns a 19th-century island community of outcasts and roughnecks whose way of life makes the local priest run away. Thereafter the community discovers that it can’t live without a priest. As Bazin puts it, the “sacrament is part of their social economy; it is necessary for the elimination of sin. Deprived of its religious organ, society poisons itself, its blood becomes tainted. In front of the empty tabernacle, this community of murderers and thieves discovers that it is irremediably Christian.” What happens is that, little by little, the former sacristan assumes the role of priest. First he speaks to the islanders – and they listen; “out of his mouth come the words of Truth and Life that the parish priest hadn’t been able to utter.” Having thus gained in moral authority, he is pressured by the community to start hearing confessions, then to give absolution, and finally to say mass. He never forgets that he is a false priest – that he lacks the power of turning bread into the body of Christ. “But he also feels that the confidence placed in him is like an almost irresistible calling, and that, wretched creature though he may be, he is not unworthy. To live up to this confidence, he is forced to conform his life more and more to the model of the priesthood: he gives up his job, calls off his marriage, and moves into the rectory. This asceticism makes him resemble even more what the community wants him to be; it seems that nothing distinguishes him from a priest anymore, from a good priest, from the parish priest that the diocese is incapable of sending to the island.”

Of course, a real priest eventually arrives, and the sacristan is forced to stop impersonating one. Bazin finds that the filmmakers have erred in making this actual priest “repugnant and stupid.” As Bazin explains, the drama shouldn’t boil down to a choice “between a false but appealing priest and an authentic but repugnant and stupid one”; the real choice is “between the two halves of the priesthood, between consecration by the community and consecration by the sacrament.” In the case of the impostor, even as

a kind of grace gradually asserts itself in him, the absence of the priestly sacrament makes itself felt. All his sacrifices, all the good that he does for his brothers, can’t change anything. […] For, although it is true that the sacristan is worthy of being a priest in the eyes of his brothers, he can’t give them what even the most unworthy of defrocked priests could. [On the other hand,] the best of priests wouldn’t do for these people, who wouldn’t recognize themselves in him. The highest religious achievement of this work is in reminding us of an eminent Christian truth that the last few centuries of Catholic history have dangerously shunted aside […]: namely, the communal origin of the priesthood. This “heathen” island, defending its false priest, is perhaps not making any less Christian a statement than the Catholic hierarchy that becomes indignant at their sacrilege. The truth that the islanders are unconsciously promoting is, as it were, the complementary opposite of the truth to which the miserable priest of The Power and the Glory bears subjugated witness.

God Needs Men. Editor’s collection.

Delannoy’s film is, in other words, “the negative instance” of Greene’s novel. Bazin praises a scene in which the new priest throws onto the ground the small pieces of bread prepared by the women of the village for the false priest’s mass: “They are indeed only small pieces of bread. But even the most irreligious viewer will gasp at the horror of this gesture and will understand the grievous fear of the sacristan, who attempts to tiptoe softly on his clogs so as not to dirty what could be the Body of the Christ.” As in The Power and the Glory, “the sacramental reality is made palpable,” but here it is made so “by its absence, as in the geometric theorems that one can prove only ab absurdo.”15

The Third Man and Welles

André Bazin was interestingly ambivalent about The Third Man – a cinematic sensation in 1949-1950. In his initial report from the 1949 Cannes Film Festival16 (where Carol Reed’s film won the Grand Prix), he praised Graham Greene for writing thrillers that have a spiritual subtext (where Greene was concerned, these terms of praise were becoming generic by the late 1940s). Bazin also detected, in the atmosphere of Reed’s picture, the influence of French films by Marcel Carné. (Although he hadn’t reviewed anyhting by Carné, Greene had been a champion of 1930s French poetic realism, writing rhapsodic and evocative prose in praise of films like Jean Renoir’s La bête humaine and – especially – Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko.) Revisiting the film for Le Parisien libéré upon its French release, Bazin had other generous things to say – he actually called Carol Reed “the most brilliant British director and one of the world’s best.” However, this time he added that he found Reed’s work here a bit too flashy (although he also added that Orson Welles’s acting contribution was “sublime”).17 By the third time he reviews The Third Man, writing now for the Catholic intellectual magazine Esprit, Bazin is ready to confess he had been initially irritated by the film, finding Reed’s direction too tricksy, given to flamboyant effects that made the “intimations of metaphysical depths” (Greene’s specialty) feel no less illusory.18 Surprisingly, he still ends up praising Reed’s glossily expressionistic treatment of his authentic Viennese locations (in another article, he calls it Reed’s “baroque spectaculaire”)19, describing it as a welcome reaction against Italian neorealism, which is “in danger of turning into a cliché.” Still, Bazin’s subsequent references to the Reed-Greene-Welles sensation will never entirely lose a slight undertone of distaste or suspicion.

On the other hand, his view of Welles will be durably inflected by Graham Greene. In his writings on Macbeth (1949) and Touch of Evil (1958), Bazin praises Welles, as a writer-director, for being of the devil’s party – in other words, for knowing how to create, like Greene, corrupt, depraved, or evil characters who nevertheless are somehow superior to the more virtuous characters confronting them – and also for knowing how to imbue the devilish with a touch of grace, with a glimmer of redemptive possibility. Both times, Bazin specifically mentions Greene. He actually concludes his discussion of Macbeth with the slightly enigmatic assertion that Welles himself, had he not existed, should have been invented by the British Catholic novelist.20

Greene and the Influence of Cinema on the Modern Novel

Reviewing George More O’Ferrall’s adaptation of The Heart of the Matter, Bazin noted that the much-vaunted cinematic affinities of Greene’s fiction (of Simenon’s too, for that matter) have often proved more apparent that real.21 He had made this point before in a major essay (from 1951) about films adapted from books – “In Defense of Mixed Cinema,” also known in English as “For an Impure Cinema: In Defence of Adaptation.” For Bazin, the idea that modern literature has come under the influence of cinema (Greene’s fiction being usually presented as key evidence, alongside Hemingway’s, Malraux’s, or Dos Passos’s) is a near-commonplace that should be resisted. In Greene’s case, Bazin notes that his literary simulations of film techniques do not correspond to the way things are actually done in films.22 It’s a pity that the French theorist doesn’t elaborate on this insight – he doesn’t actually go into Greene’s “film techniques” (his suggestions of cuts, tracking shots, and montages of objects in close-up, the way in which he balances action and description with character subjectivity and moral-psychological atmosphere, making the internal imbue the external) or into how those techniques differ from actual cinematic storytelling. And of course, the influence of the cinema on Greene’s literary imagination is not only a matter of adapted techniques. As critics like James Naremore have more recently showed, the filmgoer Greene was after images, moments, and scenes that ignited his novelistic imagination. This lends a special excitement to descriptions like the following: “the seedy doctor at Marseilles so used to furtive visitors and illegal operations that he doesn’t wait for questions before he lights the spirit flame: the dreadful cataracted eye: the ingrained dirt upon his hands: the shrewish wife picked up in God knows what low musical-hall railing behind bead curtains: the continuous shriek and grind of winch and crane. […] the camera shoots at a slant so that the dingy flat rears like a sinking ship. You have to struggle to the door, but you can run downhill to the medical couch and the bead curtains.”23 The scene described here by Greene occurs in Julien Duvivier’s Un carnet de bal (1937), but it could occur in one of his own novels from that time – in both A Gun for Sale (1936) and Brighton Rock (1938) there are scenes featuring similar details. The kinds of films that inspired Greene in the 1930s, catching his imagination with moments of what he called “poetic cinema,” included works of the British documentary film movement, works of French poetic realism, unpretentious farces, the odd Soviet film.… But he was certainly partial to what James Naremore has described as “an ironic mixture of romance, perversity, and quotidian horror, communicated through realistic black-and-white photography.”24 However, the influence of this particular cinematic brew on Greene’s literary imagination doesn’t concern Bazin, who only addresses the matter of his purely tehnical debt to the cinema. And he concludes that even if the novels of Greene, Malraux, or Dos Passos have been “somewhat shaped by the aesthetic gravitational pull of the cinema, this influence of a new art has unquestionably not been greater than that of the theatre on literature during the last century. The influence of a dominant neighbor on the other arts is probably a constant law.”25

Hitchcock

One of the crucial critical battles of the postwar era, with an impact that quickly spread beyond French film culture, involved disagreements over Hitchcock’s artistic importance. Graham Greene’s name comes up a lot in these debates. Because Greene and Hitchcock were somewhat similar – both were English Catholics excelling at fast-paced narratives of suspense that often involved manhunts – and also because Greene’s fiction enjoyed a degree of high-cultural prestige or, at least, serious intellectual attention, denied at the time to Hitchcock’s cinema, the British writer was a useful reference for both sides of the Hitchcock debate.

André Bazin leaned more to the conservative, skeptical side, but he was always sensitive to some dimensions of Hitchcock’s achievement, and as more of his younger colleagues were building ever more passionate cases for Hitchcock, he was willing to listen and even have his mind changed to a certain extent. Still, at the time of Strangers on a Train (released in France in 1952), he doesn’t sound very different from the postwar English critics who saw Hitchcock as technically ingenious but otherwise limited, and argued that he had lost touch with English life and started setting his films in glossy make-believe Hollywood worlds, becoming less and less interesting in the process.26 In this view, Hitchcock’s films were to be judged harshly for their lack of literary values like depth of character, sociological observation (the English pictures contained some, but it was always rather thin), and serious moral purpose. Here comparisons with Greene usually came in handy. Reviewing a rerelease of The 39 Steps, Bazin noted that both Englishmen told stories of wrongly accused men on the run.27 But Greene, as Bazin put it in a short article about the thriller genre, was trying to develop a “théologie policière.”28. The characters of Brighton Rock, as Bazin observes in a review of that film, may be superficially similar to those of other crime pictures, and their deeds may be sordid, but they are lent gravity by the suggestion of invisible ties with heaven and hell, with death and destiny.29 Greene’s narratives of mystery and suspense, like Simenon’s, keep hinting at other, metaphysical mysteries – for instance, at the paradoxes of grace, which sometimes can elude the virtuous to descend upon the sinner, etc. Bazin could have also mentioned Greene’s insistence on confronting his readers on every page with the prevalence of suffering in human life. Although he is a teller of often sensational tales, this insistence helps to mark him as something other than a purveyor of escapism, as someone closer to conventional notions of what a serious artist should be doing. By the standards of Greeneian gloom and Greeneian hinting at heaven and hell being at stake, Hitchcock is easy to cast in the role of mere escapist.

Shortly after his doubting review of Strangers on a Train, Bazin returns to the subject with an article called “Must We Believe in Hitchcock?”30 He begins by conceding that Hitchcock is the most competent director in the world, as well as a resolutely experimental filmmaker – “each film of his is a journey to the end of film technique.” The question is what lies behind the fireworks. Having said that, Bazin immediately backs away from what was already starting to announce a crude statement of the form-content dichotomy. Quoting Alexandre Astruc’s notion of the film camera as pen, he writes – very modernly – that cinema is not about adding direction (mise en scène) to a screenplay; theatre is about that. In cinema, as in the novel, it is only the écriture that matters – meaning not the writing of the screenplay but the writing on film, the writing of the film: in a word, style. And Hitchcock’s camera-pen is the most advanced, his écriture is the most supple – it can do anything and go anywhere. The problem with Hitchcock’s Rope is that that particular experiment – pursuing the long take to its limit – is a dead end. Welles had pursued it enough. Now the path to true innovation lies elsewhere, while the Hitchcock of Rope keeps applying his ingenuity to a technical problem that in Bazin’s view is not that important in itself. Bazin believes that the way forward in cinema, after Welles and the neorealists, has less to do with the long take per se than with the handling of duration – freeing it from the exigencies of drama and spectacle, accomodating stretches of inaction, of dead time in which nothing conventionally significant seems to be happening. Bazin paints Hitchcock as an innovator who has actually fallen behind the times.

Strangers on a Train. Screenshot

Turning his eye to the master’s most recent picture, Bazin compliments the first 25 minutes of Strangers on a Train for being worthy of Graham Greene – and a better approximation of Greene on screen that Carol Reed’s expressionist treatment of The Third Man. Then things go wrong. Hitchcock starts throwing in all sorts of effects – anything to keep the viewer tense and entertained. Rather bizarrely, Bazin accuses Hitchcock of using cross-cutting during the hero’s climactic tennis game, thus stooping to the level of a B-western. There’s no effect that he wouldn’t use. This complaint actually sounds a lot like those made by Greene himself in his reviews of ’30s Hitchcock films, the idea being that Hitchcock cares only about his little touches and bits of flashy technique, paying little attention to how they hang together. A classic statement of this position – echoed by Bazin 15 years later – can be found in Greene’s review of Secret Agent (1936): “His films consist of a series of small ‘amusing’ melodramatic situations: the murderer’s buttons 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.”31

The final article by Bazin that I propose to examine here is from 1955.32 It finds the critic at another stage of his struggles with Hitchcock. By then, the whole debate has moved to another stage. The pro-Hitchcock camp is gathering force. The first book on him, by Bazin acolytes Éric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, is two years away. Bazin will review it enthusiastically. For now, he cites approvingly a 1954 article by François Truffaut, who has traced the theme of identity transfer running through the Hitchcock oeuvre. The Rohmer-Chabrol book will also make much of Hitchcock’s Catholicism. Bazin still resists such attempts to make Hitch more like Graham Greene. He explicitly writes in his article that, unlike his fellow English Catholic, Hitchcock hasn’t made visible efforts to “transcend the thriller genre by endowing it with a metaphysics.” But although “the psychological, intellectual and moral reach of Hitchcock’s suspense” still looks somewhat limited to Bazin, he is more cautious about dismissing Hitch as a mere formalist. Quoting Hitchcock’s statement that he cares less about stories than about ways of telling them, Bazin adds approvingly that such a preference is perfectly normal for an artist. Recognizing Hitchcock as a disciple of Thomas De Quincey’s essay “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” is also an important insight. In the end, returning to the matter of thematic profundity, Bazin doesn’t know how far to go in agreeing with Truffaut and the other brilliant young Hitchcockians who keep uncovering rich threads of meaning. Is Hitchcock hiding his game from interviewers and casual reviewers? Is he profound without knowing it? Is he really the equal of artists like Renoir, Eisenstein, and Rossellini? This time, Bazin knows well enough to leave his questions hanging.