How Graham Greene earned The Spectator a place in cinematic history

When Graham Greene impulsively took up film reviewing for The Spectator in 1935, he was not yet the renowned literary figure he was to become, and thus, like so many other writers in those parlous economic times, prosaically in need of cash. As it happened, the confluence of interests between a 30-year-old novelist of modest commercial success and Derek Verschoyle, The Spectator’s literary editor from 1932 to 1939, resulted in something extraordinary — for there is nothing prosaic about these reviews. Greene’s opinions about the films he critiqued for the magazine over nearly five years constitute an impromptu cultural history of the 1930s, in addition to being a joy to read. That they led to Greene’s more lucrative occupation as a screenwriter makes his achievement all the more remarkable, since Hollywood in those days was just as indifferent to art and as merciless toward dissenters as it is today.

‘How, I find myself wondering, could I possibly have written all those film reviews?’ Greene later wrote. ‘Those films were an escape — from the hellish problem of Chapter Six, from the secondary character who obstinately refused to come alive, escape for an hour and a half from the melancholy which falls inexorably round the novelist when he has lived too many months on end in his private world.’

The more compelling explanation as to why Greene took film criticism seriously is that he really liked the cinematic medium, despite his criticisms of many of the films he reviewed. His observations about the most ordinary feature films often sparkle, and he is even better when he approves particularly of a film or a performance. Greene was notoriously anti-American on matters of politics and culture, yet his tolerance of Hollywood ‘ballyhoo’ and crassness, and his appreciation of certain actors and scripts, chafe with the stereotype of the condescending Englishman looking down on New World parvenus.