Graham Greene's impact in motion pictures wasn't quite as vast as his impact on literature, but it was close. (We're referring, of course, to the English novelist, not the Native American actor, who, despite some fine on-screen performances, has yet to produce the Great American Novel, or even the Great American Indian Novel.) In addition to producing some of the finest novels of the 20th century, he was also a noteworthy screenwriter and helped bring The Third Man into existence, thus creating a classic film and one of Orson Welles' most notorious characters. (He was also a prominent, and often highly engaging, movie critic until he had the bad taste to point out the obvious fact that many of Shirley Temple's fans had something more than a pristine interest in the child actress' talents.)
Greene was always fastidious about making a clear delineation between what he called his real fictions — serious literary works like The Power and the Glory by which he hoped his career would be judged — and his 'entertainments', thrillers and other popular genre productions which he viewed as little more than a means to make money. His own views notwithstanding, many of Greene's 'entertainments' — almost all of which have been turned into movies between the time of their writing and today — are often coterminous with his best writing, and should be thought of as what they are: masterful pieces of modernist writing which, despite their often pulpish trappings, are exquisitely written and fraught with meaning. Perhaps the greatest of his 'entertainments' was 1938's Brighton Rock, the story of the death of a London reporter in the holiday resort town of Brighton at the hands of a terrifying, dead-hearted teenaged gangster named Pinkie Brown. It was made into a movie nine years later, with Greene himself co-writing the screenplay. How faithful an adaptation was it?
WHAT IT HAD: Right off the bat, it had Graham Greene. That alone makes it superior to many of the modern-day adaptations of his work, and some of his sterling dialogue and razor-sharp characterizations come through quite well in the movie. It also had a young Richard Attenborough, nicely assaying the role of the sixteen-year-old killer Pinkie Brown (the bad Catholic endemic to all of Greene's major works); with his cold eyes, slender frame and barely suppressed hatred of everything around him, Attenborough — who would scarcely ever surpass the job he does here — does a remarkable job of capturing one of twentieth-century literature's greatest villains. Director John Boulting is no Carol Reed, but he does a good job matching Greene's tight screenplay with dark, moody, noir-style work behind the camera.
WHAT IT LACKED: There are a few flat moments in the script (though it's hard to blame Greene's co-writer, the often excellent Terrence Rattigan). While the top-notch British character actress Hermione Baddeley does a fine job as Attenborough's foil, much of the supporting cast is mediocre, especially an inexperienced Carol Marsh as the moonstruck girl Pinkie must seduce and silence. But the main thing that keeps the movie version of Brighton Rock from matching or even exceeding the novel is the heavy hand of the British Film Board, which demanded a number of changes be made that kept it from hitting hard on the the themes that were highly important to the book. In particular, the novel's incredibly dark ending was transformed by the censors into an improbable moment of religious uplift!
DID IT SUCCEED?: A victim of its time, the movie version of Brighton Rock had the bad fortune to come out at a time when the British motion picture industry was still in the throes of rapidly decaying moral standards. While it, like many noir pictures, did what it could to skate around the decency codes, much of the book's dire, twisted sense of Catholicism was written off by the censor, as was the earthy sexuality displayed by Baddeley's character in the novel, and, of course, the final moments, when the vicious, damned Pinkie Brown manages to strike back even from beyond the grave. However, despite the hokey ending, it's still a very worthwhile movie, no more lost to movie-industry moral codes than any number of other worthwhile gangster noirs. It's definitely worth watching, especially for Attenborough's performance; but if you've read the book, you likely won't be able to shake the feeling that it might have been better adapted twenty years later.