Fallen Idols: Graham Greene on Screen

October 6–28, 2017

Films written by Greene or based on his fiction illustrate his famous axiom: “human nature is not black and white but black and grey.”

Read full description

The Third Man
Our Man in Havana
Brighton Rock
Went the Day Well?
The Fallen Idol
Ministry of Fear

Upcoming
Films
Upcoming
Events
Selected
Objects
Past
Films
Past
Events

Past Films

Ministry of Fear
- Saturday, October 28 8:15 PM
Fritz Lang
United States, 1944
Ray Milland is released from an asylum into an even stranger milieu—wartime London, stalked by Nazi spies—in Fritz Lang’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel. “A tour de force of paranoia” (Cinematheque Ontario).
Our Man in Havana
- Saturday, October 14 5:45 PM
- Friday, October 27 4 PM
Carol Reed
United Kingdom, 1960
4K Digital Restoration

A vacuum-cleaner salesman in steamy Cuba turns to international espionage in this droll spy spoof from a quartet of formidable Englishmen—actors Alec Guinness and Noel Coward, writer Graham Greene, and director Carol Reed.
Brighton Rock
- Saturday, October 21 8:15 PM
John Boulting
United Kingdom, 1947
Richard Attenborough stars as a teenage psychopath leading a gang of toughs in Brighton, Britain’s seedy seaside resort. “The best film to capture [Graham] Greene’s seedy world of evil, sin, and betrayal” (The Observer).
The Fallen Idol
- Sunday, October 15 4:30 PM
Carol Reed
United Kingdom, 1948
Graham Greene and Carol Reed’s gripping, gorgeously visualized thriller about a boy, a butler, and the butler’s secrets “reminds us of the glories of the black-and-white cinema at its peak” (New York Observer).
Went the Day Well?
- Saturday, October 7 5:30 PM
Alberto Cavalcanti
United Kingdom, 1942
An unsuspecting British village is infiltrated by sixty German paratroopers in “a wartime conspiracy thriller, a black-comic nightmare and a surrealist masterpiece” (Guardian), based on a Graham Greene story.
The Third Man
- Friday, October 6 7 PM
Carol Reed
United Kingdom, 1949
Digital Restoration

Joseph Cotten pursues Orson Welles through postwar Vienna in Graham Greene and Carol Reed’s cynical masterpiece. “Seeing it on the big screen is like watching it for the first time” (New York Times).

Fallen Idols: Graham Greene on Screen

October 6–28, 2017

“When I describe a scene, I capture it with the moving eye of the cine-camera,” Graham Greene (1904–1991) said of his fiction-writing technique. No wonder the work of the British novelist took so naturally to the screen. Although he was skeptical about the movies, as about so many things—“I cannot help wondering whether from this great moneyed industry anything of value to the human spirit can ever emerge,” he wrote in 1936—Greene was also a self-described “film man,” working as a cinema critic in the 1930s and later lending his pen to some of the finest and darkest achievements of Anglo-American suspense filmmaking. The Greenean cinema is both supremely entertaining and unsettling in its obsession with betrayal and ethical ambiguity, illustrating his axiom, “human nature is not black and white but black and grey.”

This series features six films written by Greene or based on his fiction, including two exercises in wartime...

This series features six films written by Greene or based on his fiction, including two exercises in wartime paranoia, Alberto Cavalcanti’s Went the Day Well? and Fritz Lang’s Ministry of Fear; Brighton Rock, adapted by Greene from his novel and featuring a charismatically loathsome young Richard Attenborough; and the three products of the writer’s celebrated collaboration with director Carol Reed, The Fallen Idol, The Third Man, and Our Man in Havana. Whether set in jaunty-seedy Brighton, bombed-out Vienna, or sun-dazzled Cuba, all take place in a treacherous territory where the moral compass rarely reads true. Welcome to Greeneland.

Juliet Clark, Guest Writer

Less

Series organized by Senior Film Curator Susan Oxtoby.