Rock mixes location photography with expressionistic studio sets, but its costuming and interiors resemble the 1930s French cinema or the Warner gangster cycle. It is in fact a kind of historical film, chiefly because the city of Brighton feared that Greene's depressing story might discourage tourism. To calm local officials, the producers garbed the characters in prewar costume and introduced a 'crawl' explaining that contemporary Brighton had become a safe and happy playground. Brighton Rock is flawed by this gesturealso by John Boulting's uneven direction and by Hermione Baddeley's rather brassy portrayal of Ida Arnold. Because the immediate source for the screenplay was Rattigan's theatrical adaptation, the picture never achieves the subjective intensity of Greene's novel or of The Fallen Idol (1948), the noirish and highly Jamesian murder story Greene made immediately afterward with Carol Reed. And yet, it contains an effective performance by Richard Attenborough as Pinkie Browna disturbingly androgynous character whose moods alternate between Napoleonic swagger and infantile terror. It also depicts Greene's version of the Waste Land quite accurately: sunny but rather tacky images of Brighton beach are set off against sinister views of the pier at night, and the white interior of a modern luxury hotel is counterpointed with Pinkie's gangland slum, where the sound of squalling babies can be heard through open windows. Perhaps more important, Brighton Rock is the only film based on one of Greene's crime novels that emphasizes his paradoxical religious symbolism. As a result, it has one of the most unsettling conclusions of any thriller of the period.
The last scene of the picture begins with a dissolve from the black, rainswept waters of Brighton Pier, where Pinkie has fallen to his death, to a brightly lit room in a Catholic home for wayward women. Rose, accompanied by a nun, sits on the edge of a bed, wearing a shabby frock and holding a portable phonograph. 'I ought to have gone with him!' she cries. 'I don't want any absolution ever!' Cut to a close-up of the lipsticked nun, who speaks rather sanctimoniously about the ''appalling strangeness of the mercy of God,' and who suggests that if Pinkie was capable of love he has some hope for salvation. 'I'll show you!' Rose announces, and she puts her treasured record on the player. At this point, we have already seen Pinkie inside the recording booth, leaving a sadistic message: 'What you want me to say is I love you. You little tramp! Why don't you go away forever and let me be?' We have also seen him unsuccessfully try to smash the record, which he realizes could be used as evidence against him in the event of Rose's death. Now we hear his voice again: 'What you want me to say is I love you.' Suddenly the record sticks: 'I love you. I love you. I love you.' As the words repeat themselves, a smiling Rose walks out of frame toward an open window, and the camera tracks forward to a cross on the wall, holding all image of the crucified Christ.
Greene later spoke about the film's conclusion as if it were a concession to the popular audience: 'Anybody who wanted a happy ending would feel that they had had a happy ending' (quoted in Shelden, 345). But even if we assume that the record will always stick, the effect is anything but happy. The new version merely brings us a bit closer to the irony at the end of Heart of Darkness, where a woman is told a lie to protect her from the horrible truth. Perhaps for this reason, Brighton Rock was unsuccessful at the box officeespecially in America, where it was eventually retitled Young Scarface and treated as a gangster movie. In the years before the liberalization of censorship codes and the development of a large distribution network for art films, it was viewed as a cross between an unfashionable genre picture and a respectable literary adaptation. Variety reported that Brighton Rock had been released at a moment when Hollywood was 'frowning' on stories about gangsters and that it was likely to 'meet with serious objections from America's Production Code Administration.' To make matters worse, its Cockney accents would be confusing to American viewers, and its religious symbolism would probably 'arouse the ire of Catholics.' The only selling point for the project, Variety concluded, was that it was based on a 'best seller'' by Graham Greene (6 July 1947).
No such problems affected Greene's later and much more famous movie, The Third Man (1949), an international coproduction based on an original screenplay by Greene, which was financed in Hollywood style by Alexander Korda and David Selznick. In contrast with Brighton Rock, this film treats Greene's religious themes with a discreet irony: at one point Harry Lime tells his friend Holly Martins, 'Of course I still believe, old man. . . . I'm not hurting anybody's soul by what I do.' At the same time, it features a thrilling chase sequence by Carol Reed, a popular music score by Anton Karas, and a memorable star performance by
Orson Welles. It therefore fulfills Greene's long-standing desire to make an effective thriller that also functions as an art movie. On the second of these levels, The Third Man offers not only the neo-Calagarisme of Carol Reed's tilted camera, but also a quasidocumentary tour of Vienna, one of the cradles of both modernism and Hitlerian fascism, which has been reduced by the war to a kind of 'Greeneland.' Consider, too, the thematic and technical elements of Greene's screenplay. The protagonist and narrator of the story, Holly Martins, resembles both a Jamesian innocent and a Conradian secret sharer. Like Marlow in Heart of Darkness, Martins is an impetuous, sentimental romantic; also like Marlow, he searches out a villain who makes a delayed entrance, after being described by several people. Significantly, one of these narrators is a man named Kurtz, who, in a conversation with Martins, claims to have been Harry Lime's best friend'after you, of course.'
As everyone now knows, Orson Welles wanted to make his own film of Heart of Darkness, which he put aside shortly before making Citizen Kane. Here, merely by virtue of his charm, he transforms Harry Lime into the most dangerous of the 'angelic' or Luciferian killers who populate Greene's fiction. His entrance is so impressive that it tends to make the audience forget exactly what crimes Lime is supposed to have committed (something involving black-market penicillin and dead babies). What everyone recalls is a burst of zither music and a series of images that confirm Greene's 1928 argument about the 'poetic' force of silent movies: a tall figure slipping into the shadowed doorway of a house (the home of the young Mozart); a cat licking a pair of black Oxfords; and a sudden, spotlighted view of Welles in a black hat and topcoat, the camera zooming toward him as he smiles like a ham actor who has been caught doing something naughty.
'Don't be melodramatic, old man,' Harry Lime says to Holly Martins as they ride the giant Ferris wheel above Vienna. But of course Lime (whose name has an affinity with Greene) is the most melodramatic character in the filma dashing, flamboyant outlaw, reminiscent of Fantomas or the Shadow. The naive Martins adores him, and because Martins is played by Joseph Cotten, we cannot help but be reminded of Jed Leland's relationship with Charles Foster Kane. The beautiful and masochistically romantic Anna (Alida Valli) pines for him, even after he turns her over to the Soviet authorities. For these two and for the audience, Lime provides a glamorous alternative to the social engineering in postwar Vienna, where the forces of modernity have divided a 'smashed and broken' city into four zones, and where the charming old ring at the center is patrolled by military units representing each of the occupying powers. The cold war has already begun, and daily life for the Viennese is constricted by rationing, checkpoints, identification papers, and worthless currency. Lime operates above and below this worldchiefly in the miraculously clean and undivided sewers, where the police wear white uniforms resembling those of a ski patrol. The most beautiful, dramatically lit scenes in the picture take place in his watery underground, and one of the most poignant sequences is the moment when he is trapped and killed there by a man who has always loved him. 49
Three 'angelic killers' in films based on Graham Greene: Alan Ladd in This Gun for Hire (1942), Richard Attenborough in Brighton Rock (1946), and Orson Welles in The Third Man (1949).
In this film, however, the seductions of melodrama are never offered without countervailing irony or deflation. Martins is an American 'scribbler' who specializes in pulp westerns; he has experienced outlaws only in his imagination, and, like the movie audience, he gradually realizes that his attraction to Lime amounts to a complicity with evil. Lime, meanwhile, is revealed as a witty sociopath. During his ride on the Ferris wheel, he chews an antacid tablet and projects a fake cheerfulness, comparing himself to a modern-day bureaucrat: he, too, has a 'five-year plan,' the only difference being that he deals with ''the suckers' instead of 'the people' and with 'dots' instead of statistics.
Eventually, Lime dies. But there is something almost sacrificial about the image of his fingers reaching through a manhole cover in the street, and about Martins's coup de grace, which is administered offscreen. After Lime is gone, the film does nothing to assuage the sense of moral ambiguity he has created. Martins and Anna do not go off into the sunset, as they do in Greene's novelized version of the story; instead, Carol Reed shows Anna
