During
his tenure with British intelligence, Graham Greene reported directly to
the notorious Soviet mole Kim Philby. It
was rather fitting the espionage novelist and chronic adulterer would be so
closely associated with such a significant betrayer. Yet, Greene consistently offered tortured
defenses of his friend. He was “complicated”
that way. Thomas P. O’Connor surveys the
writer’s work and ironic life in Dangerous
Edge: A Life of Graham Greene (promo here), which airs this Friday night on most PBS
outlets.
Greene
was never awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he was nominated for an
Oscar. Indeed, with so many Greene's books
and screenplays produced for the big screen, O’Connor has a wealth of cinematic imagery available
to illustrate Greene’s oeuvre, without ever scraping the bottom of the
barrel. In fact, at least two of Greene’s
scripts became outright masterpieces: The Third Man and Fallen Idol, both
directed by Carol Reed.
Essentially,
O’Connor focuses on three sides of Greene’s persona: the writer, the
adventurer, and the adulterous, spiritually doubting manic depressive. Much is made of Greene’s persistent “boredom,”
his euphemism for depression, as well as his conversion to a decidedly flawed but
earnest brand of Catholicism. Greene’s
biographers point to Greene’s reluctant status as the preeminent “Catholic
novelist” of his time, while rather openly carrying-on with a woman who was not
his wife, as one of the many great contradictions defining his life. Fair enough.
O’Connor
incorporates talking head interviews with some top shelf literary figures,
including Sir John Mortimer, Paul Theroux, David Lodge, and John Le Carré, who (quite
surprisingly) blasts Philby for coldly and deliberately causing the deaths of numerous
colleagues. Again, O’Connor was
fortunate to have considerable audio recordings Greene, sounding like quite the
acidic raconteur. Bill Nighy also serves
as the supplemental voice of the author, reading his letters and documents when
the archival Greene is not available. It
is a rather classy package, narrated by Sir Derek Jacobi.