French had been musing on why Greene had always expressed a preference for The Fallen Idol over the more highly esteemed The Third Man, the reason being, Greene said, that it was more a writer’s film whereas The Third Man was more a director’s movie. The second quotation comes from the third edition of Quentin Falk’s study of cinematic adaptations of Greene’s work, Travels in Greeneland (2000), when he draws attention to an observation from the Observer’s film critic, Philip French made on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of The Third Man in 1999. “He analyses danger,” wrote Greene of Ambler, “as carefully and seriously as other novelists analyse guilt or love.” 2 His review of Judgment on Deltchev suggests a stylistic literary kinship particularly derived from their common cinematic experience. We know that Greene was an admirer of Ambler’s work, describing him as “unquestionably our best thriller writer” on the cover of a compendium of Ambler’s work and including Ambler in The Spy’s Bedside Book (1957) which he compiled and edited with his brother Hugh. When he generalizes it is as though a camera were taking a panning shot and drawing evidence from face after face.” 1 As Sherry remarked, it could be a description of Greene’s own writing style, but it is, in fact, taken from a review by Greene of Eric Ambler’s novel, Judgment on Deltchev. The first quotation comes from Volume One of Norman Sherry’s biography, The Life of Graham Greene (1989), where Sherry is quoting from a review of a novel published in 1951: “The cinema has taught him speed and clarity, the revealing gesture. My interest was piqued still further when I recalled quotations cited in two classic works of Greene scholarship, which, in an interesting and oblique way, seemed to confirm my conviction that the parallels between Ambler and Greene were worth pursuing. They were both major screenwriters who had made a significant contribution to British cinema during its heyday of popularity from the late 1940s to the end of the 1950s they were both masters in their fictional field who, particularly during the 1930s, brought a new literary respectability to the genre of the mystery thriller they even shared the same publishers and had coincidentally spent regular periods of residence in Switzerland. (Harry Lime, looking down from the Great Wheel in The Third Man)Ī year or so ago, when I was contemplating writing a book on the relatively unexplored territory of the screenwriting career of Eric Ambler, one outcome seemed certain: I would need to devote a chapter comparing Ambler with Graham Greene. Governments don’t, so why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat and I talk about the suckers and the mugs. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving? These days, old man, nobody thinks in terms of human beings. “International business may conduct its operations with scraps of paper, but the ink it uses is human blood.”
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