Graham Greene, badass film critic: can you imagine any major publication today running this kind of review about a major motion picture -- or a major opera house production -- by someone like Greene, getting sued because of it?
In fact, Greene’s most famous review, of the John Ford-directed Temple vehicle Wee Willie Winkie (1937), became his Jude the Obscure, prompting 20th Century Fox and Temple’s lawyers to sue Greene and Night and Day
for libel. Who knows who else was appalled, but for Hollywood this
restatement of Greene's earlier opinions was just one film critic's toe
too far over the line:
Infancy is her disguise, her appeal is more secret and more
adult. Already two years ago she was a fancy little piece (real
childhood, I think, went out after The Littlest Rebel). In Captain January
she wore trousers with the mature suggestiveness of a Dietrich: her
neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap-dance: her eyes had a
sidelong searching coquetry. Now in Wee Willie Winkie, wearing
short kilts, she is completely totsy. Watch her swaggering stride
across the Indian barrack-square: hear the gasp of excited expectation
from her antique audience when the sergeant’s palm is raised: watch the
way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity.
Her admirers—middle-aged men and clergymen—respond to her dubious
coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body,
packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story
and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire.
Scandalous, sure, but this also has the impact of all good criticism: it changes how you view the original.
Greene's film writings have been collected in book form, by the way.
Opera Chic has a weakness for this gem about her beloved Carole Lombard:
"it is always a pleasure to watch those hollow Garbo features, those
neurotic elbows and bewildered hands, and her voice has the same odd
beauty a street musician discovers in old iron, scraping out
heart-breaking and nostalgic melodies."
"Those
neurotic elbows and bewildered hands"? Priceless.
