My Journal Of Greeneland: Ranking 18 Great Novels By Graham Greene

Novelist, reporter, scriptwriter, storyteller, playwright, columnist, globe-trotter, voluptuary, Catholic: these are the many and versatile facets of Henry Graham Greene, better known as Graham Greene, one of the 20th century's greatest and most influential literary talents. To explore all these eclectic sides to the alternately acclaimed and controversial man would be a suitably epic and enthralling quest but that might take some time, even for a seasoned and self-confessed admirer like me. But I do feel compelled to recommend many a novice and even my dearest friends to take a leap of faith and embark on a thrilling, alternately hilarious and heartbreaking and ultimately enlightening and eye-opening odyssey into the landscape of Greene's literature. 

So, here is an unofficial ranking of the 18 novels that I have read so far. There is still a lot of exciting ground to be covered; I am yet to discover his entire collection of short stories, his smaller pieces like Loser Takes All and quite a few more novels of equal standing, both his earlier works like Stamboul Train and It's A Battlefield or the later, more accomplished Monsignor Quixote. 

Then, there are those plays and critical essays and columns as well. But for now, these 18 novels, all of them, come highly recommended to all, not just to readers but also those who want to travel across space and time with a discerning eye and an unerring sense of prescient reality. 

18- Doctor Fischer of Geneva: Or The Bomb Party (1980)

Presumably written as a sharp-tasting, acerbic response to the crusty, preening and self-aggrandising elite of Swiss society (Greene was then living in Vevey), this slim and surreally dark-witted metaphysical parable on the boundless depths of human greed and built around a grimly comic social experiment might be simplistic but does not go soft on its satirical punch. Its basic, linear structure is made compulsively, perversely readable by Greene's still-flawless penchant for nuance and detail and the titular overlord, far from a Bond villain, himself ranks as one of the writer's most enduringly Machiavellian characters ever. 

17- The Man Within (1929)

Greene's first published novel, even with the occasional flowery prose that stops remarkably short of being purple, is a lot more compelling than what its unimpressed author believed. The Man Within lays down the essential groundwork for his trademark style of storytelling: a self-doubting, far from heroic protagonist, the conflict between righteousness and the seductive allure of vice, a deliriously romantic but doomed love story and criminals with hearts of gold. The writer doffs his hat clearly to the classic adventures penned by Robert Louis Stevenson but look closer and you will find enough subversion in his coolly sardonic portrait of corruption in the countryside. 

16- A Gun For Sale (1936)

As the earliest of Greene's English crime and espionage thrillers, A Gun For Sale is so luridly thrilling and propelled with such an enthralling sense of nihilism that you might mistake it for a Raymond Chandler paperback, if not for the credibly sordid English atmosphere that this slim thriller reeks of. The plot thunders like a steam engine, the bitter assassin anti-hero Raven transforms into an unforgettable vigilante of the night, there is a strong-willed and spirited heroine in between and as always, Greene blends pre-war paranoia and political intrigue smoothly and seamlessly to add an unmistakable touch of poetic profundity to the pulpy proceedings. 

15- The Captain And The Enemy (1988)

Do not be misled by the seemingly simplistic, even low-key facade that had reportedly disappointed and confused critics. Greene's last novel is actually one of his most devilishly, cynically best. The narrative is almost dark-edged and ironical in its unreliability and slipperiness, as Victor Baxter, also known as Jim, chronicles his life with two equally untrustworthy surrogate parents: the enigmatic, elusive Captain and his doomed, fatalistic lover Lisa. Even the second half of the novel, staged like a geopolitical thriller of duplicity, belies the really devastating conclusion to which the writer drives at: love is as self-destructive as King Kong shot to death and every father is a bloody scoundrel. 

14- The Third Man (1949)

Before that masterpiece of noir got made, this was the working treatment and subsequently published novella from which Greene devised his flawless screenplay and Sir Carol Reed developed the final film. Inevitably, it suffers a bit in comparison to that still-influential classic. But on its own strengths, it is every bit stealthily sardonic, quietly suspenseful and, on occasion, even more melancholic and sobering than the film. Borrowing gleefully the template of Eric Ambler's The Mask Of Dimitrios and yet infusing a new angle of betrayed friendship and lost innocence, Greene again delivers a timely portrait of a beautiful city battered by war and now again ruled by the utterly amoral. 

13- Travels With My Aunt (1969)

Never too far away from the contemporary realities of his changing times, Greene set out to take a comic jab at the waning days of the counterculture of the Sixties through the point of view of old-timers trying to make some sense of it all. This entertaining, even unexpectedly poignant adventure follows retired bank manager Henry Pulling and his still-hedonistic Aunt Augusta on a nostalgic and naughty trail across old-school Europe and frolicsome Paraguay. Crammed with lovers and friends, dotty or dying, with warmly funny asides on international smuggling and smoking pot, Travels With My Aunt is a vivid, picaresque read that heralds a new era and still bids a passionate, heartfelt farewell to the old. 

12- The Tenth Man (1985)

Unfairly shelved when first written in the Forties, one of Greene's other story treatments was eventually published, with his consent, and the end result is a far more profound piece of work than what its cinematic counterpart could have been. The storyteller's peerless sense of time and milieu is evident here in spades, a terse, drily romantic and heart-rending tale of a rich lawyer in occupied France who pledges his wealth to escape death by law. The consequences that come hurtling down on him exemplify Greene's tremendous flair for chronicling crime, guilt and punishment, culminating, with beautifully orchestrated prose, at a climactic and unexpectedly heroic stab at redemption. Gripping and moving in equal measure. 

11- Brighton Rock (1937)

For many admirers and critics, Brighton Rock is the definitive moment in Greene's illustrious career that cemented his reputation and literary style forever: metaphysical and moral dilemmas, anti-heroes and antagonists blinded by their misguided righteousness, a sordid flavour of a city bursting with sin and vice and, of course, unforgettably hypnotic and credibly strong-willed women who hold the reins too. Ida Arnold, the intrepid amateur detective and do-gooder poking her voluptuous, blousy charm into the mystery of a murder in broad daylight, might be the working model for Francis McDormand's determined cop in Fargo. It is also Greene's passionate, heartfelt portrayal of his haplessly crooked Catholics that makes this such a haunting classic. 

10- The Honorary Consul (1973)

Ask me about my favourite pulp thriller and instead of all the Sidney Sheldons, Jeffrey Archers and Wilbur Smiths of this world, I would choose The Honorary Consul. The reasons are to be found in the novel itself, a tight, taut drama of a kidnapping gone wrong that turns into a surprisingly thoughtful and humane meditation on the ideas of love and lust, of faith and forgiveness and of the Spanish concept of machismo and even the English stiff-upper-lip. It is ingenious how Greene sustains the brittle, feverish tension right till the end and how he plays off each character devilishly, so much that this book, while crammed with suspense, is also loaded lethally with inconvenient truths. 

9- A Burnt-Out Case (1960)

Trust Greene to serve up even the most unsavoury premise into a compelling, beautifully crafted novel, subtly satirical and deeply compassionate in turns, about the human condition. A Burnt-Out Case ranks among one of his darkest novels yet, a literal odyssey into the heart of human suffering and despair in a remote leproserie in Belgian Congo. Newly arrived in this scene of pain and mutilation is Querry, a once-famous architect who has now become coldly indifferent to the world. In the heat, his practised cynicism begins to thaw but his new purpose is exaggerated to sainthood. The majestic prose and the thoughtful themes pose troubling questions, which make us reexamine our knee-jerk belief in falsities. 

8- Our Man In Havana (1958)

Sixty years have come and gone and yet, in our present day when the truth is blown wildly out of proportion to ferment trouble, it is no mistake that Our Man In Havana should still be so prophetic and prescient. The passage of time has not quite blunted its still punchy impact as a cheeky, yet eerily believable satire on earnestly crafty spies cooking up tall tales and falling prey to their own shenanigans. If anything, Greene's droll portrait of a world where people are driven to foolhardy ends in the name of patriotism is more resonant than ever. Even his swirling portrait of Havana's seedy beauty and more murky truths is impossible to replicate.

7- The Ministry Of Fear (1943)

Arguably the greatest of his British thrillers (I have to read The Confidential Agent yet), The Ministry Of Fear is more than just a rattling wrong-man yarn that Alfred Hitchcock served out regularly; it is an incisive, unsettling portrait of a country and its people driven to paranoia in the mists of war and in bleak, pitch-dark atmosphere, it has no other rival. In the embittered Arthur Rowe, we find one of his hauntingly memorable sufferers, pursued across a bombed London by a dedicated organisation of spies and murderers. With its unrelenting grip of almost menacing, nihilistic dread and with no relief in sight, the book seems to have inspired not only wartime thrillers but also 1984. 

6- The Human Factor (1978)

Greene might have inspired the likes of John Le Carre and Alan Furst to come up with their own grittier and grimmer spy thrillers that refute Ian Fleming's entertaining extravaganza of grand conspiracies and glamour. But it was with The Human Factor, possibly the lost cousin of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, that he delivered his most enduring novel of the genre. Initially disliked because of the deeply cynical portrait of a bureaucratic and back-dealing British intelligence, this colourless, coldly nihilistic and frequently heart-rending novel is actually a richly drawn and exceptionally resonant piece of work. The way he equates the vulnerability of honesty to the duplicity of love with the skulduggery of espionage is unforgettable. 

5- The End Of The Affair (1951)

Even when he is writing romance, Greene shows no signs of mellowing. Maurice Bendrix, the bitterly sarcastic protagonist, describes his inexplicably aborted affair with the married Sarah Miles as a story of hate. Indeed, there seems to be a sense of malice, almost impulsive anger in how the writer lets Bendrix narrate his part of the story, going back from his new-found pangs of sexual jealousy to their shared passions. Then, he sneaks in and reveals Sarah's painful confessions recorded in her diary and what strange force compelled her, on that fateful afternoon, to bring an end to her affair. That strange force, as this hauntingly hypnotic novel reveals, is faith, something which is both all-consuming and frustrating in its obstinacy. 

4- The Heart Of The Matter (1948)

Nowhere else is Greene's mastery of multiple genres evident to a greater degree than in The Heart Of The Matter, his dark and dank novel about a well-intentioned police inspector in Sierra Leone who is seduced by the Devil when his all-too-generous pity gets the better of him. As a study of the infidelity we are all capable of to the concepts of marriage and faith, the novel arrives at harrowing conclusions and a particularly disturbing climax. But before that, the compellingly plotted narrative, blending a turbulent socio-political premise with a deeply personal story of guilt and redemption and populated with plausible, believable characters also makes for one of the most powerful reading experiences ever. 

3- The Comedians (1963)

Never the one to compromise on his hard-bitten political stance, Greene's anger and anguish over Haiti's brutal dictatorship, reigned by the intimidating Papa Doc Duvalier and sponsored secretly by America, find their manifestation in this stunning, sobering novel. With a cinematic, elaborate and even elegiac narrative of exceptional depth, The Comedians uses its multiple-thread narrative, of idealistic American vegetarians and confidence men trying their luck in this failed country, to paint a convincing portrait of totalitarian terror and the grimly comic incapacity of the West to understand these grimy realities. It also features one of his most enduringly tragic heroes in the luckless Major Jones, who also proves to be the finest comedian of them all. 

2- The Quiet American (1955)

It would be hard to find a more perfectly structured and powerfully prophetic novel than The Quiet American. Like The Comedians, it compels Greene to argue potently about the insidiously dangerous nature of America's foolhardy intervention into the turbulent chaos of the third-world that would lead, twenty years later, to the self-destructive humiliation of the Vietnam War. But more than that, it is a brilliantly constructed love triangle that becomes even a dramatic battleground for ideologies and interests. It also demonstrates Greene's flair for professional dexterity and economy. Real-life observations of the ravages of war fought then by the colonials find their way organically into the narrative and it is still impossible to look beyond that moral - that even the best intentions can be more dangerous than merely evil ones. 

1- The Power And The Glory (1940)

A monumental masterpiece and a staggering culmination of his heart-wrenching first-hand observation of religious persecution in Mexico in the 1930s under the rule of the Red Shirts, The Power And The Glory is indisputably Greene at the very peak of his powers, even as other books in this list contend for that same title quite easily. From beginning to end, he tugs us into a dark, claustrophobically hostile world as we follow his anonymous protagonist, a worldly but weary whiskey priest as he tries to do his duty and also come to terms with his own mistakes and sins. The prose is starkly beautiful in its bleak desolation and the narrative is almost as relentless and poetic as a Biblical narrative unfolding on a contemporary canvas. Yes, The Power And The Glory is marked with unmistakable despair as an atheist lieutenant, goaded by his own idealism of a world without illusions, pursues this priest at any cost and a helplessly treacherous Judas leads him to his fate. But there is hope, there is wonder, there is even a miraculous, heart-pounding climax and there is Greene's powerful, impassioned plea that it is the flawed and the corrupt rather than the merely righteous who deserve the status of sainthood. 

Yesterday: A Love Ballad That Makes You Feel Fine

Last year, I visited the treasure trove of nostalgia that is Cavern Club in Liverpool. Walking down the winding, spiralling stairs to the basement that echoed with joyous, exuberant covers of many a classic chartbuster (and tittering irreverently at a bamboozled lady to a song about Lucy and diamonds), I found myself eventually thronged on all sides by fellow worshippers of the extraordinary, still melodious music of four legendary Liverpudlians, a winsome blend of grinning old-timers and bright young things, all dancing and swaying to the eclectic tunes being played by a mop-topped singer, from the earliest pop subversion of Ticket To Ride and Help! to the roaring politics of Revolution and Get Back. 

Indeed, how can one imagine a world without the Beatles? The very thought is not merely preposterous; it is horrifying in just how much it would rob us all of not just there music but the overwhelmingly emotional impact that they have left on us all, uniting Beatlemaniacs across the globe, like me from India and a couple of friendly beer-chugging men who greeted me and hailed from Sweden, in a religion. That would mean that Yesterday, in the hands of a different filmmaker or writer, would qualify for a horror story, a tale of the most depressing dystopia. 

And so, it is a marvel that, in the hands of director Danny Boyle and writer Richard Curtis, the film becomes such a charming, delightfully frothy romantic comedy that, despite a premise that aims consciously for inevitability, even predictability, has still plenty of wit and even subversion and delicious insight crammed into the most unexpected corners. 

Jack Mallik, an Indian-British lad, is an aspiring musician who is no longer feeling fine about his chances to make it big. Nobody really cares about his gigs in good old Suffolk and even as his best friend, the vivacious Ellie, does everything to help him out as a de facto manager, he is ready to throw in the towel. That is until one evening when the world blacks out in the space of a handful of seconds and his bicycle is slammed by a bus. Having lost a few teeth in the accident, Jack tries to remain upbeat and casually asks Ellie if she will still feed him when he is 64. She does not quite get it. 

There is something to be said about the subtle, confidently stoic narrative sleight of hand that Boyle and Curtis use to let the gravity of the new situation sink in. When gifted a gleaming new guitar, the first song that Jack can think to sing, about how all his troubles were far away the day before, makes everybody listening shut up, stirred and shaken, just as you might have felt when you first heard that rousing voice and those sad strings. It is the greatest heartbreak song ever written or sung and yet while Jack's friends are understandably gobsmacked, they cannot believe that a group of men named after insects or those cute Volkswagen automobiles actually sung and recorded it first. To them, in hindsight, it is not quite Coldplay. 

You can imagine Jack's startled predicament then. He rushes home and soon Boyle plugs the narrative on a live-wire of quirky, nutty comedy. Google informs our hapless, non-plussed protagonist that the Beatles are actually beetles and that John Paul George and Ringo actually means Pope John Paul II. Destiny seems to have delivered a strange miracle for this struggler and he lunges at the chance unabashedly, as Yesterday makes us wonder: does he do it for fame or does he do his bit to preserve all he can remember about those geniuses who wrote those incredible songs?

Boyle and Curtis are clearly interested in the latter which is why so much of Yesterday comes across as splendidly, ingeniously clever. The invisible but all-too-palpable influence of the iconoclast band on how we imagine the highs and lows of love is what this film portrays so successfully. Even the stand-alone sequences and visuals are written and filmed with devilishly wicked wit; when recording She Loves You, Jack and Ellie hold for that pause as a suburban train rattles outside. 

Then, later on, discord between them stems less from Jack finding his footing at the top of the pops and more from Ellie wondering, openly, as to what place does she hold in his life apart from being his intrepid manager for so long. It is a sweet sugary romance at heart that is nevertheless crisp to the taste in the most unexpected ways, like one of those crowd-pleasing McCartney song made a little edgier with Lennon's unmistakably sharper wit as well. 

But Yesterday also does not forget George and Ringo; this is a thoughtful enough film that ponders big enough questions, like Jack tormented by the moral integrity of his ascent to stardom by accident or him pushed to a corner in one scene and most memorably and literally crying out for help when he faces the prospect of losing Ellie too. For all the weightier elements that the film explores, much of it is nevertheless a deliciously unhinged lark, in the charmingly old-school style of Ealing comedies. Ed Sheeran shows up in a snarky, hilarious cameo as a preening, Salieri-esque celebrity version of himself who advises Jack, rather disastrously, to sing Dude instead of Jude. And Kate McKinnon hams rather enjoyably as a bloodthirsty American record producer who cannot quite understand Jack's besotted admiration for his own material. 

Newcomer Himesh Patel is quite a treat as the suitably perturbed Jack, blending an every-guy sense of earnestness into a very credible foil of derring do that compels him to plunge headfirst into the baffling world of fame and fanfare. Cast against him is the beautiful, beautiful Lily James, an actress who is only getting more evocative and effervescent with each subsequent role, as Ellie. She is vulnerable, quirky, messed-up, confident all at the same time and both the lead share a sparkling chemistry that makes their romance, even with its obvious simplicity, so worth rooting for. 

All you need is love, the boys sang once so memorably. The film believes in that universally appealing message in manifold ways. At one level, Yesterday is about the love we all share for those very boys and just how much of their incredible legacy cannot be imitated or even bettered; watch out for a scene in which everyone gives up trying to replicate those extraordinary album covers or for that scene in which Jack cannot quite get how to cover Eleanor Rigby. And yet, on a deeper, more heartfelt level, it is about the one thing that the group always stood for: following your heart and pursuing what or whom you love till the end of the world. There is even a cosmically special appearance by a true legend that makes your heart stop for a second and then makes a Cheshire grin of wish-fulfilment bloom on your face. 

Boyle, God bless him, has made a winsome film that celebrates not only the greatest musical group of the world in all its magical glory but also the heady thrill of falling in love and fighting for the same against the allure of destiny. Like the song with the same name, Yesterday might be a simple ballad on the surface but it is undeniably profound in its ultimate impact. We should not forget that the Beatlemania began with a memorable song about only holding hands. 

My Rating: 4 Stars Out Of 5

The Third Man: The Greatest Noir Thriller Of All Time

‘Best friend I ever had…’

‘That sounds like a cheap novelette’.

Pause. 

‘I write cheap novelettes’. 

And, thus, in the space of three spare lines, Sir Carol Reed’s The Third Man, written by storyteller extraordinaire Graham Greene, demonstrates just how false, ludicrous or even flimsy our friendships and allegiances can be. The morally complex construct in which the film operates, one that the author’s admirers call ‘Greeneland’, is an eerily prescient landscape of the real world that is teeming with little, seemingly casual but acutely unsettling betrayals at every corner: the slobbering, desperate disciple who turns into a pathetic Judas in The Power Of The Glory, the willing, wanton lover of The End Of The Affair who transforms into a saint to a cause that is hard to believe in  the earnest, misguided do-gooder who steals a cynic’s only love with his innocence in The Quiet American and the enigmatic and eventually elusive surrogate father of The Captain And The Enemy. 

In The Third Man, as in these works, moral duplicity and treachery are to be found, according to Reed and Greene, in the most innocuous of all relationships – that of camaraderie that begins at tender, unassuming boyhood and paves the way for a friendship that becomes a malicious, selfish game in adulthood. Malice is one of the writer’s pivotal themes, malice in carefully calibrated degrees yet casual and even reckless in nature and consequence and it also gives Reed the opportunity to flesh the deeply bitter irony of the narrative with his own wry, witty storytelling vigour. 

‘Already in hell…or in heaven’, announces the earnest and diffident Austrian porter in the beginning of the film, as Holly Martins, a wet-behind-the-ears pulp hack from faraway America, is told on his arrival in war-torn Vienna that his best friend Harry Lime was killed in an accident just a few hours ago. Right from that disorienting moment and the subsequent scene in which Martins is suitably perturbed at the strange faces standing around Lime’s coffin being lowered into a snowy grave, the director and writer plunge us into a cinematic territory that feels darker and more markedly cynical than the usual American noir thriller. 

The cold, blasted and battered Vienna, divided into four zones for each of the Allied powers and yet, one that ‘doesn’t really look any worse than a lot of other European cities’ is a far cry from the sunlit, palm-lined vistas of California or the American wasteland of motels and garages with which we usually equate the genre of modern noir; nor does it have icy blondes with dubious, even promiscuous intentions or hard-boiled detectives fashioned after Bogart. Yes, it does have an arching, monologue-spouting kingpin but he too is etched out in Greene’s trademark strokes of boyish bravado and a misplaced, perverse sense of incorruptible belief, as in Pinky from Brighton Rock or the eponymous bon vivant of Doctor Fischer Of Geneva, who devises ‘grand’ parties designed to humiliate his guests out of a mysterious quest for some elusive truth. 

And so, we follow Martins in this cold and alienating post-war landscape of vice and illegal trade, the film siding inevitably with a hopelessly out-of-sorts protagonist who is again hardly the sharp or particularly shrewd cynical protagonist who teases out the truth with their brains or fists. With a Southern accent slurred at the edges with drink or a lazy predicament, Martins feels like one of Greene’s archetype American characters, not wholly trustworthy or even heroic and distinguished from their greyer and more rascally English or European counterparts with their sense of adventurous idealism that leads them to inevitable doom. 

In the original story, later published as a novella, Martins was envisioned by Greene as Rollo Martins, English hack writer who wrote Westerns under an American pseudonym and the result was a more taciturn character who has shed his naiveté and knows his way around the moral complexity of his world better than his on-screen version. In the film, much of the dark hilarity derives from how Martins finds himself hurled from one shenanigan to another, on a wild goose hunt for a truth driven by righteous anger at his best friend being called a ‘murderer’ by the police. 

It is not only his bumbling, stumbling, purely incidental foolhardiness that earns our laughs; it is also Greene and Reed’s ear for wry humour that makes so much of the film disarmingly hilarious, even absurdly comical. Think, for instance, Lime’s shady friends and their terse encounters with Martins: Kurtz’s clumsy lies, Popescu’s showboating Continental swagger, Winkel’s cold Teutonic indifference. Or think of poor Mr. Crabbin, arranging Allied propaganda events which include both Hamlet and Hindu striptease dancers and mistaking Martins for a serious author, leading to one of the most uproarious scenes in cinematic history.

For all the lark, it is the grimmer, grimier side of Greene’s story and Reed’s film that haunts even today. The film is an insidiously harrowing portrait of the moral venality and helpless, even desperate disorientation that one could experience all too clearly in the aftermath of the Second World War. Cities like Vienna and Berlin were indeed left vulnerable to the swarm of many a profiteer running an amoral conspiracy; even the Allies were as much at the helm of these illegitimate dealings as the Nazis who escaped to havens in South America and Egypt. One of Greene’s numerous gifts as a powerfully prophetic, astute storyteller has been his incisive, relentlessly probing dissection of the many political upheavals on the world map through both his essays and novels. 

From the Mexican wasteland of the 1930s, policed thuggishly by the Red Shirts and where faith itself was a crime worth capital punishment to the sweetly poisoned exotic colour of Cuba at the end of Batista’s hard-fisted regime, from the debilitating end of the French colonial rule in Indo-China, paving the way for the travesty known as the Vietnam War to the dark, dank dystopia of Haiti under Papa Doc Duvalier, hellholes and failed democracies have intrigued both Greene’s Machiavellian imagination and his deepest, most heartfelt sympathies. Vienna, in contrast, feels benign in its desolate, dilapidated state; there are still jolly plays being staged at the Josefstadt Theatre but there is no denying the evil that lies at the heart of darkness of its black market trade, as evidenced by just how many casually callous medical practitioners came under the scanner after the film was released. 

All this comes brilliantly, ferociously to life with Reed’s brilliant, almost compulsive demonstration of technique, aided by his superb cast and crew. Shooting, for most part, on location and shooting most of the film in night, with cinematographer Robert Krasker devilishly blending seminal Dutch angles and a masterful play of chiaroscuro, the director not only succeeds in creating an unrelenting atmosphere of paranoia but also adds unmistakable touches of pathos to even the littlest of the scenes, lingering on a wizened landlady muttering angrily and desperately when the Allied military police ravage her house and leave it all a tumble or in the tears that stream down the face of the sad-eyed beauty Anna, bringing a melancholic Expressionist flavour to the noir plotting.

His audacious decision, of choosing the literally unknown zither player Anton Karas to compose the entire score with his single trademark instrument, pays off in spades, resulting not only in one of the most mesmerising themes ever composed but also suggesting that the ravages of war had still not quite obliterated Austria’s hidden gift of melody. 

The cast is flawlessly chosen. Valli, looking both deceptively demure and elegantly tough willed, is more than just a femme fatale; she is a real, believable woman, etched out in Greene’s peerless character building strokes as full of intriguing contradictions, heartbroken with torment and yet also willing to play along with the harsh truths of her life. The charismatic Trevor Howard plays the crusty, coolly sarcastic Major Calloway with wry, silken ease while Joseph Cotten makes for a very compellingly feckless and flustered Martins, portraying his character’s boyish predicament more credibly than what Reed’s original choice James Stewart would have done with the same character. 

Much scene-stealing is done by an American legend whose name I would hate to reveal to the uninitiated and who ad-libs a famous monologue about how evil breeds pure genius. And special mention should go rightfully to the fascinating Austrian veterans picked to play some very crucial roles, like Paul Horbiger as the befuddled but somewhat amiable porter. And watch out for Bernard Lee, who would later be cast as M in the early James Bond films, as the polite but quick-fisted Sergeant Paine. 

So much of what went into bringing the film to screen is the stuff of legend: Reed and Greene’s resolute and steely creative defiance against the sensationalist tendencies of Hollywood producer David O’ Selznick, Reed and Greene’s debate about the climax (the latter insisting on a happier alternate end hinting at a possible romance), Greene’s guerrilla style reportage of the black market rackets and his journalistic portrait of the city’s frozen cemeteries, hotels, drinking places and even the sewers and Reed’s painstaking command of directing all the three production units himself. 

What makes The Third Man, seventy years after it first released, still flawless and effective as both a startling thriller and a richly sardonic morality play acclaimed and deserving of the same accolade as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Orson Welles’ Touch Of Evil or even The Fallen Idol (also directed by Reed and written by Greene)? The answer is to be found in the film’s deceptive mathematical simplicity, when compared to the more elaborate tangle of lies and conspiracies to be found in its American counterparts like The Maltese Falcon or for that matter in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. 

The film has, on the surface, a largely basic and low-key premise, of a curious, nonplussed protagonist trying to find out the truth behind his friend’s most mysterious and all-too-convenient death, only to uncover a bigger game afoot but such is Reed and Greene’s immaculate attention to the smallest and most devilish of details, from character quirks to mistaken intentions, from the strangeness of an alien tongue to even our capacity for deliberate omission of the truth, that the film remains constantly exciting, enthralling and brilliantly powerful and affecting even today.

Bharat: A National Disaster of Storytelling

'To understand just one life you have to swallow the world,' This is not something that Ali Abbas Zafar's Bharat suggests to its audience; rather it is a confession made by the protagonist of one of the most memorable novels of all time. Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children was not just about what its title meant, a bunch of children born exactly at that twilit moment when India woke up to freedom. It was also an overwhelmingly larger-than-life, suitably epic and even irreverently picaresque portrait of a country and a subcontinent finding its awkward, stumbling footing after independence and partition mirrored in the alternately trivial and melodramatic domestic upheavals of its protagonist Saleem Sinai's charmed and cursed existence.

It is also everything that Bharat aspires, in its lazy, distracted way, to be but comparing Zafar's sloppily crafted film to Rushdie's magnum opus and post-modernist classic, or even to the more low-key Korean film An Ode To My Father, does not make sense, really. Even without the somewhat unreasonable expectations, this is a cinematic catastrophe that deserves no pardon. Everything, from storytelling and characterisation to even a basic portrait of the changing milieu of the country with whom the titular protagonist shares his nam, is merely flimsy window dressing for the incredulous superstar on the screen to shove aside mercilessly. 

That he does inevitably, merely by the dint that he is played by Salman Khan, an actor whom it is impossible to take seriously anymore, so bloated is his on-screen visage on his own self-aggrandising celebrity status. We begin with his bulking and huffing and puffing Bharat, looking hardly convincing as a gruff septuagenarian who grunts and frowns at a family of people played by refreshingly unfamiliar faces who, regrettably, have nothing to do at all in the film. How could they? This is all about him. 

His story begins on a somewhat promising note, even though by now we have had enough of more genuinely tragic cinematic stories staged against the tumult of the Partition. We have seen it all now: a son swears tearfully to take care of his family moments before his father disappears forever. Still, at least in these few initial reels, Zafar's film is humming comfortably in an assured narrative direction that makes way for a full-fledged potboiler, true to the masala roots of Manmohan Desai and Manoj Kumar. But what follows instead is neither here nor there, a banal, often shoddily scripted film that jars because there is no rhythm or flow here. At one moment, there is the silliest of slapstick, at another, there is yet another blatant, misguided public service announcement. 

All of it is also incredibly exasperating, rather than entertaining. At a hundred and sixty-seven minutes, Bharat plods on and on, digressing into unfunny situations and asides with badly etched caricatures and with a bunch of forgettable songs. The mediocre quality of the film's potential entertainment value and slipshod, anachronistic production values are not the only areas where the film wastes away all the talent involved. Zafar, vying vainly and amateurishly for overarching ambitions, crams in too many side players to Bharat's odyssey through many a shoddily recreated timeline and yet none of them have anything substantial to do than just throw in silly jokes for what their money's worth. There is a supporting ensemble, all right, but save for Sunil Grover's sidekick trying his valiant best to be this film's Nawazuddin Siddiqui, pretty much everyone gets shortchanged. 

Veterans like Kumud Mishra, Brijendra Kala and Satish Kaushik are reduced to cartoonish roles that are either inexplicably smug or nonsensical, an unnecessarily ill-clad Disha Patani romps around for about five minutes or so, thrusting her svelte body vigorously to no alluring effect and as for Tabu's much-touted cameo, it only reminds us that an actress of her calibre has no business being in such drivel. 

And then there is Katrina Kaif, probably one of the more annoying things in a film that fizzles out too early and becomes a tedious bore. In an attempt to make her Kumud as a straight-up and sassy woman, both Zafar and Kaif ham atrociously and the result is a painful, even grating heroine who is more frustrating instead of being a welcome foil to Bharat's cloying earnestness. It does not help that she is given large, badly written chunks of dialogues to mouth; the vain effort to be taken seriously as a performer is too much of a tall order for the lady. 

In Rushdie's novel, the tumultuous and even doomed arc of Saleem Sinai's life is held up as a looking glass, both magical and morbid, of India's many initial promises nurtured, questioned in its forays into war, and then betrayed by the onset of the Emergency in the 1970s. Coming closer to cinema, the eponymous naive hero of Forrest Gump is carved out as a cast-iron model of incorruptible sincerity in an America that sheds a little of its innocence with every watershed cultural and political moment it witnesses. And in The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp, Colonel Candy's trenchantly English stiff-upper lip is tested by the increasingly complex realities of the wars that his country engages in. 

In Bharat, there is no such discerning or subversive insight to be found in its hero's single-minded showboating exploits. We are dragged along uninterestedly in his flaky, ridiculous adventures as a daredevil stuntman in a circus, a heroic worker in the oil fields of Arabia, an able-bodied seaman who outwits Somalian pirates and while all these episodes might have made for a rollicking time in a more enjoyably brainless outing, the film's mock-serious pretensions weight them down. We wait for some shred of insight to be found in his decisions and motives but we get nothing, except for chest-beating displays of patriotism (as evidenced by an awfully jingoistic scene when the audience itself is roped in to rise for the national anthem) and thick-headed, self-serving machismo. 

What is he then? As embodied by Khan's embarrassingly awkward performance that now fails to rouse any sense of fanfare, let alone convince, he is, at the most, full of the same superstar bilge that we, as a nation, end up nevertheless worshipping to no end. In one of the stray clever moments in the film, we are told that the 1990s saw the birth of not one but three superstars. That is all that we can glean from a film this randomly and carelessly directed, written and staged: we are forced, time and again, to swallow superstars, not characters or believable people. This time, it chokes us to death by boredom. 

My Rating: 1 Star Out Of 5

The Doomsday Clock Of Disappointment: Why We Don't Really Need The New Series Based on Watchmen

Some mere weeks ago, a whole community was flabbergasted at the travesty called the final season of Game Of Thrones. It not only betrayed the hopes and expectations of millions across the world, which was not the case with the insanely successful final Avengers film clearly, but it also reeked of the most ludicrous, risible form of lazy, hurried writing and directing. Most people bemoaned of slapdash character development, confused motives, anachronisms (and yes even Starbucks coffee cups found lying around) and, yes, even Daenerys Targaryen, the thrilling, enigmatic heroine of the series, not only going full-tilt psychopathic but also dying most forgettably in unheroic fashion. Sigh.

 I cite this recent instance because, while I have never belonged to that community, I can understand just what all those outraged comments, and that petition signed by thousands, were all about. HBO is now primed to unveil a new series based on Watchmen. Yes, Watchmen, that extraordinary literary achievement, that staggeringly larger-than-life and seminal graphic novel written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons. It might have sounded a promising idea in the beginning, albeit one tinged inevitably with skepticism, but as the recently unveiled teaser of the same proves, Watchmen is just not a good idea to be filmed on any screen, be it silver or small. 

Now, let this not be understood by some as heresy. I first read all the 12 issues of this sensational, stunning masterpiece back about 5 years ago and I simply could not help but salivate over it and devour it again and again, whenever time presented an opportunity. A dark-edged yet emotionally poignant satire on not just the flawed all-American concept of the costumed superhero but also the flawed dimension of America and its socio-cultural milieu spanning across disparate generations, Watchmen is, quite simply, the most prescient and powerful slice of Americana coming from England that not only paved the way for grown-up comics or subsequent works by other English peers like Neil Gaiman's American Gods. It also represented popular literature at its most profound, prophetic and politically and emotionally resonant.

A year later, my beloved gifted me the hardbound treasure trove of this great, great novel's Deluxe Edition and that made me feel an even stronger and more vehement form of selfish love, along with the fear that Hollywood, Netflix or any of those big, cash-churning entertainment factories, would unearth this raw, unfiltered raw of brilliance and influential storytelling and process it into some trashy, plasticky imitation, much like Snyder's film ten years ago, which I hate with a distaste as vehement as my love for the book. 

Now, out of nowhere, what seemed like a comfortably remote possibility has come true. HBO, which is already in cahoots of planning prequels to Game Of Thrones, has finally discovered this incandescent quartz and while it will always be impossible to eliminate the indelible traces that Moore and Gibbons' work left on us in its original shape and form, I fear that today's generation, a generation that was cultivated more on a superhero or grown-up fantasy film and television franchise and less on hardcovers and paperbacks, will lap this up, thinking it to be subversive. 

Let me return now to why this magnificent book would not be a good idea for a screen adaptation. To begin with, the material is just not cut out for the populist, mainstream sensibilities of both present-day TV and cinema. With the multi-million dollar franchises that Marvel and DC, both giants in the world of comics, have created, there would be, to put it bluntly, only space of lily-livered creativity, the kind that satisfies more popcorn-fuelled excitement than put up something truly extraordinary. 

Back ten years ago, for all the abysmal quality of the final product, it might have sounded like a brave attempt when Snyder, backed by two mammoth Hollywood studios, would go ahead and release a film adaptation that, to give it a little credit, would be about marginally as uncompromising as the source and in any case, quite a lot for the average cineaste accustomed to bloodless superhero films to digest. But in today's time, Hollywood would, God bless them, not even consider pouring in their best minds and talents to adapt a novel whose premise is inherently the very opposite of populism or even conventional popularity. 

That is perhaps why it has now found space on the small screen, undeniably a platform that is more encouraging and fertile to more subversive, unconventional storytelling, as evidenced by a spree of series that bust censorship boundaries in favour of telling a unique and incredible story. Damon Lindelof, best known for co-creating Lost, a legend of the small screen that itself owes some of its path-breaking ideas to Watchmen, is in charge of this project too but while he claims to be an absolute fanatic of the source, well, Snyder was one such fanatic too and we know very well that fanaticism does not translate necessarily into great adaptations. 

But then, as some might argue, isn't the new Watchmen series looking radically different from what we read or saw in the book? I concur indeed: the book certainly did not have a vigilante army wearing Rorschach masks; in any case, Walter Kovacs himself was never portrayed as an anarchist rallying up his followers but was rather a lone, sociopathic and bitter masked avenger who refused to compromise, even for dignity's sake. And while the inimitable Jeremy Irons might be something of a casting masterstroke as the sleek, smoothly malicious mastermind Adrian Veidt, this is not the world of Watchmen as we, fanatics, who can quote entire lines from the Tales of The Black Freighter verbatim and even wax eloquent about verses by Blake and Shelley and Daniel Dreiberg's fascination with birds or even remember the lyrics of Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello sprinkled at the end of the issues, have known for so many years. 

That is, however, the least of my complaints. As I will always maintain, as long as an adaptation comes daringly close to the complexity and subversion of the source, it will be worth my money, regardless of the detours and digressions from the original that it would take. Change the plot, tweak the characters, do whatever you want to and everything would be welcome as long as these decisions make sense and materialise into an actually worthy final product that also enhances the experience of reading the source too. If this new series can do it, betraying my skepticism, I would lovingly hold it up as a companion to the book. But there is a slim chance of that, which brings me to the most crucial reason why any adaptation, be it a reworking or a faithful retelling, of Watchmen is bound to fail. 

That reason is redundancy. Simply put, we don't really need an adaptation or even a reinterpretation of Watchmen. There are novels and tragedies that, timeless as they are, are befitting of being adapted to the present day milieu, to bring in a refreshing perspective, an approach without ruining the rich brilliance of the source. There are other books like Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, the more politically charged and metaphysical of Graham Greene's work, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World or Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow or even Daphne Du Maurier's intricate, dazzling stories, that refuse to be shoehorned into another storyteller's vision, unless that it is a storyteller with both integrity and ingenuity. Watchmen is clearly one of the latter novels and while an argument has been made for more visionary storytellers like David Cronenberg and Terry Gilliam bringing it to motion-picture life, they have all honourably given up on the impossible task, acknowledging thus the untouchable brilliance. 

And yet, even citing everlasting literary brilliance is not enough. Aren't there more than the necessary number adaptations of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Bram Stoker and Agatha Christie? Fine, but as evidenced by why we are yet to have a worthy adaptation of Midnight's Children, The Power and The Glory or even A Farewell To Arms, it is less of a question of brilliance and more of a self-awareness among filmmakers that literary brilliance cannot be rivalled or even improved upon. The vision presented by the raging, explosively brilliant mind of Moore and the gritty, vivid artistry of Gibbon's panels is complete and crystallised, not to be tampered with. Yet, unnecessarily, DC went ahead relentlessly and green-lit not only the disappointingly anticlimactic Before Watchmen series that is considered as something of a joke by most worshippers, but also figurines and T-shirts. Even Veidt would not approve of it. 

So, we don't need a Watchmen series right now. In fact, we don't need any more adaptations of this flawlessly brilliant work. It is high time since we stopped believing that Snyder's film had a better ending (I cannot understand how is that possible) or whether an alien invasion was necessary or even if Rorschach's journal will ever be published. Why can't we be happy with the treasure that we have in our hands already?