Mornings in the Dark: The Graham Greene Reader
edited by David Parkinson
Arriving at Oxford in 1923, the young Graham Greene made one move he was to regret 30 years later, when applying for a US entry visa — he joined the Communist party for a few weeks. Much less regrettable, he appointed himself the film critic of Oxford Outlook (editor G. Greene). This of course was the heyday of the silent movie and the undergraduate Greene could be found bent over the latest piece on montage by Pudovkin or Eisenstein in the magazine Close-Up. He later recalled his horror at the arrival of ‘talkies’ — it seemed like the end of film as an art form, just as he later regarded the arrival of colour ‘with justifiable suspicion’. Indeed when one thinks of ‘l’univers Grim Grun’ (as French critics expressed it), it is inescapably a black-and-white universe in every sense except the moral one.
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