The second novella, about a little boy in search of his (earthly) father in immediately postwar Venice (think Vienna with the sewers at ground level), lost its interest even for Greene, and had to be finished by a screenplay doctor called Guy Elmes, whose appended melodrama, with Virtue, of a kind, ironically triumphant, ends in a B-movie shoot-out on a ship in the docks of Venice. The prosthetic Greenery is seamlessly of a piece with the uncinematic confection that preceded it. Lodge promises that Greene’s panning prose, telling close-ups and terse dialogue display mastery of film notation, but that is gush without substance.

The fact, acknowledged by Lodge, that very few of Greene’s novels became good films cannot be put down to inept or venal screen adaptation. The Power and the Glory was given pious treatment, and Greene part-wrote the screenplay, but it played woodenly. The odd truth is that the movies, whatever their vulgarities, systematically deconstruct pretentious texts and expose tendentious plots. If Lodge really believes that any part of these cliché-laden pieces can be ranked ‘first- class’, or is any more worth resuscitating than was the gimcrack Tenth Man, it testifies more to his AMDG loyalty than to the accuracy of his taxonomy.

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