playing'lovely to look at, beautiful to hold, and heaven itselfa little venom of anger and hatred came out on the Boy's lips' (66).
Given the choice between Ida's sentimental humanitarianism and Pinkie's twisted Catholicism, Greene has more sympathy for the young killer. He is also intrigued by the sadomasochistic relation between Pinkie and Rose, which differs strikingly from the casual, earthy lovemaking enjoyed by Ida. In the second half of the novel, Greene exploits this perverse bonding for all it is worth, emphasizing the spiritual conflict for souls rather than the secular battle for lives. Pinkie believes in the possibility of salvation and is fascinated with priests, but he also has a disgust of sex and a need to push Rose into eternal damnation. When he catches a glimpse of her thigh, Greene tells us that 'a prick of sexual desire disturbed him like a sickness' (130). Near the end of the novel, Kite appears to him in a dreambleeding from the mouth, offering a razor, and murmuring 'Such tits.' Like Prince Hamlet, Pinkie believes that his dead father is asking for revenge, but he has a better plan than straightforward murder: he gives the devoutly Catholic Rose a revolver and tempts her with a mutual suicide pact that he has no intention of joining. 'All you need do is pull on this,' he says. 'It isn't hard. Put it in your earthat'll hold it steady' (349).
Fortunately, the police arrive in the nick of time. Pinkie dies a horrible death, smashing a bottle of vitriol in his face and plunging over a cliff. In a final twist, however, Greene denies his readers even a religious consolation. Disturbed because Pinkie died without asking forgiveness for his sins, Rose visits St. John's church in Brighton, where a priest alludes to the conservative Catholic Charles Peguy and tells her of the 'appalling . . . strangeness of the mercy of God': 'If [Pinkie] loved you, surely, that shows there was some good' (357). When we last see Rose, she is returning to her room to listen to a recording Pinkie made for her on Brighton Pier. She does not know (but we do) that the message on the record is 'God damn you, you little bitch, why can't you go back home forever and let me be?' This conclusion raises the stakes of melodrama and then, in the fashion of the darkest Jacobean revenge dramas, it knocks out all the props. Notice, too, how it reverses the situation at the end of Heart of Darkness, where Marlow refuses to tell the upper-class ''Intended' that Kurtz's last words were 'The horror, the horror! ' In Brighton Rock, a working-class woman is about to learn the full truth about the man she has married, from his own lips. Greene's closing sentence tells us that 'she walked rapidly in the thin June sunlight towards the worst horror of all' (358).
In 1938, there was little chance that such a novel could be turned into a movie; but in 1947, with the war ended, with noirlike cinema in vogue, and with Greene established as a successful author who had provided material for Hollywood, Brighton Rock became a West End play and then a British film. The theatrical version, written by Terence Rattigan, omitted the novel's shocking conclusion, but Greene was determined that the film would not do the same.
Before discussing Greene's motion-picture adaptation of Brighton Rock, however, something needs to be said about Hollywood's uses of his work during and immediately after the war, when he achieved international celebrity. At first Greene was a problem for the studios, because he was a best-selling author who subverted popular conventions. Classic Hollywood's method of dealing with him is perhaps best illustrated by This Gun for Hire (1942), one of the earliest and most commercially successful adaptations of his crime fiction. Paramount had acquired rights to A Gun for Sale before it was published in 1936, but the studio did not develop a script until 1941after the Warner remake of The Maltese Falcon, after the Hawthornden Prize for British literature had been awarded to Greene's Power and the Glory, and after the war had made overt criticism of fascism acceptable. 45 Under the credits to the completed film, the studio exhibited a leather-bound copy of the novel, as if to capitalize on Greene's literary prestige. Yet the narrative we see on the screen is quite different from the one Greene had written. The novel tells the story of a hired killer named Raven (an obvious allusion to Poe), who assassinates a socialist war minister in prewar England. Raven's employers hope to turn a profit in the munitions industry, but when they doublecross the killer by paying him in stolen banknotes, he exacts vengeance; in the end, he becomes an unwitting agent of social justice and a scapegoat who meets violent death at the hands of the law. (He is reluctantly betrayed by an attractive working-class woman whom he has begun to trust.) The Paramount screenplay, credited to Albert Maltz and W. R. Burnett (the author of Little Caesar), moves the locale to America and smoothes over most of Greene's ironiesall in the interest of wartime propaganda. In the fashion of many other crime films of the early 1940s (such as All Through the Night, a Bogart gangster picture made at Warner in the same year), it converts the villains into Nazi fifth-columnists and the protagonist into a victim of Depression-era social injustice who becomes a champion of democracy. It also changes the hero's looks: the novel's Raven suffers from a harelip, but the film's Raven, played by Alan Ladd, is a strikingly attractive young man whose only imperfection is a slightly deformed left wrist. 46 In fact, This Gun for Hire turned Ladd and Veronica Lake into the sexiest commodities in Hollywood; a pair of diminutive and sullenly pretty blonds, they seem an almost incestuous couple, and the dark, Germanic setting provides a foil to their California-style beauty.
Despite these and other changes, Paramount did not make a bad film. The studio divested the novel of its anti-Semitic elements and some of its heavy symbolism, and it added a photographic expressionism that has its own particular merits. When This Gun for Hire reached Paris in 1946, it was received as a key work in a developing noir 'series.' Borde and Chaumeton ranked it among three seminal pictures: The Maltese Falcon provided film noir with its criminal psychology; The Shanghai Gesture created a distinctive noir eroticism; and This Gun for Hire established both a new character type (the 'angelic killer') and the convention of a surreal chase through an urban landscape (45). The opening sequence of the Greene adaptation was singled out for special praise: from a low angle, we see Alan Ladd sitting on a bed in a sleazy boardinghouse, loading a gun while honky-tonk music drifts through a window; he rises, puts on a hat and coat, and gently feeds milk to a stray cat; a housemaid enters, wearing lipstick and a low-cut blouse, as if she has just stepped off the cover of a pulp magazine; she tries to chase away the cat, and Ladd slaps her in the face. Here as elsewhere, Ladd's behavior is deadpan, enigmatic, and graceful; he seems quite unlike Greene's Raven, but also unlike any Hollywood hero or villain of the previous decade. Borde and Chaumeton quote two lines from Baudelaire that 'seem to have been written for him': 'Je te frapperai sans colere / Et sans haine, comme un boucher' (46; 'I will strike you down without anger / And without hatred, like a butcher'). The allusion is in some ways appropriatenot because Ladd resembles a butcher, but because he conveys the impression of a coolly lethal dandy.
The same mixture of glamour and moral unease can be seen in Paramount's 1945 adaptation of The Ministry of Fear, an enjoyably paranoid 'wrong man' thriller that, in comparison with Greene, looks rather glossy and Hitchcockian. Ironically, the Hollywood film that best evokes 'Greeneland' is the 1945 Warner production of The Confidential Agent, which derives from a novel that Greene regarded as one of his worst. (He wrote the book at breakneck speed, devising a parodic happy ending in which the improbably matched hero and heroine sail off to do battle against fascism.) In the film, Charles Boyer plays a former concert pianist who travels to 1930s England on a secret mission for the Spanish Republicans. (By the end of the war, it was perfectly safe to make anti-Franco movies.) Boyer's costar, Lauren Bacall, fresh from To Have and Have Not, plays the alcoholic daughter of a British industrialist. 'Don't be melodramatic,' she says at one point, 'I can't stand melodrama.'' Boyer shrugs and replies, 'Well, sometimes it just happens that way.' And indeed the picture sometimes makes Boyer's attitude plausible. The settings are drab, the hero's ostensible allies are no more trustworthy than his enemies, and all of the actors look realistically downtrodden. George Coulouris is especially effective in the role of a Mosley-style xenophobe who has an artificial hand. Boyer, whom Greene admired for his ability to 'wear worry like a habit on his forehead' (quoted in Sherry 2:16), is repeatedly subjected to sadomasochistic humiliationsas when a thug beats him up under the lights of a car while Bacall and Coulouris stand on the roadside and watch. However, the most skillfully photographed and exciting scene in the film is almost Dickensian: Boyer's only friend, a shabby but sexy young housemaid (Wanda Hendrix), is pushed from a window by two grotesque villains (Katina Paxinou and Peter Lorre). When Boyer learns of the crime, he seizes a gun and sets out for vengeance. 'I've been beaten and robbed,' he announces, 'but that girl was murdered! And for this, someone is going to pay! '
All this changed after the war, when Greene briefly became an auteur in the British industry and was given a measure of control over the final product. The 1947 adaptation of Brighton Rock, produced by the Boulting brothers and scripted by Greene and Terence Rattigan, makes an interesting contrast to the Hollywood features I have been describing and is the picture that comes closest to the values Greene espoused in his prewar novels and criticism. Like many other crime films of the period, Brighton
