Shooting for an ‘Affair’ They’ll Remember

On the fifth floor of the Georgetown University library, carefully preserved in manila folders and cardboard filing cases, lie the remnants of a great love affair. It is here that any voyeur off the street can trade a license as collateral for a peek at the correspondence between novelist Graham Greene and the love of his life, Catherine Walston, whose torrid extramarital union formed the basis for his impassioned 1951 novel, “The End of the Affair.”

There are postcards and letters scrawled in the author’s tiny, almost imperceptible handwriting, telegrams from Paris, where the two trysted regularly at the Ritz. In between the desperate words of love (“You know . . . that I’d give every book I might ever write to have you beside me, day in, day out”) are romantic literary promises (“One day I’ll write you a good book,” he wrote in early 1949). On New Year’s Eve in 1950, he ended a letter with “Perhaps in 1951 I can at least publish a book ‘To C.’ but how I long to publish a book to Catherine Greene with love, love, love. G.”

“The End of the Affair,” published in 1951, is indeed dedicated “To C.” A largely autobiographical meditation on jealousy, love and religious faith, it is the story of Maurice Bendrix, a middle-aged novelist who falls in love with Sarah, a woman trapped in an arid marriage to Henry, a high-level civil servant.

If the letters offer riveting evidence of the author’s skill translating raw material into highly nuanced novelistic terms, this month marks another transformation of the tragic story, with a film adaptation directed by Neil Jordan and starring Ralph Fiennes as Bendrix, Julianne Moore as Sarah and Stephen Rea as Henry. The Columbia Pictures film opened in Los Angeles and New York on Dec. 3 and gets a nationwide release this week. It has been nominated for a Golden Globe Award for best dramatic picture.

Columbia is careful to point out that this is not a remake of the spectacular flop that was the original 1955 version. Starring Deborah Kerr, it also featured the miscast Van Johnson, a fact that Graham, who had little to do with the production, proclaimed “a disaster.”

Greene was one of the novelists of this century most involved in the business of film, both as a screenwriter of his own and other people’s works and as a film critic at the Spectator during 1935-39 and the short-lived Night and Day. He wrote the screen adaptation of his novel “The Third Man,” Carol Reed’s 1949 drama starring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten that is considered his most successful screen effort.

Most novelists turn to screenwriting for economic comforts, but unlike William Faulkner or F. Scott Fitzgerald, who considered it hack work, Greene had a genuine respect for and fascination with the cinema, and a knowing acknowledgment of its mass-driven demands. But most of the some two dozen adaptations of his work were unsuccessful and disappointing to the author.

“My books don’t make good films,” Greene once said in an interview. In both written and screen versions of “The End of the Affair,” Bendrix as his alter ego says: “The film was not a good film, and at moments it was actually painful to see situations that had been so real to me twisted into the stock cliches of the screen.”

Writer Described Works in Cinematic Terms

Nevertheless, he characterized his literary eye in cinematic terms: “When I describe a scene, I capture it with the moving eye of the cine-camera rather than with the photographer’s eye--which leaves it frozen.”

But many critics have pointed out that while Greene’s novels may seem to be cinematic, they are in fact too interior to make for easy transitions to the big screen.

“He was great at beginnings, a great conjurer of truly dramatic situations but he often buries those within the concerns of his characters,” noted “End of the Affair” director Jordan by phone from his home in Dublin.

Greene classified his works as either entertainment or serious novels, and it is generally agreed that the more serious, interior novels have been harder to dramatize. “The End of the Affair,” which fits in the latter category, has the added challenge of being considered one of his three overtly religious novels, as it deals with the boundaries of human and spiritual faith.

When Jordan reread the book several years ago, he says, he was compelled “to find the human story at the heart of what is considered a Catholic book. To let the guilt-ridden philosophical manipulation rest a bit and to find the great story that was somehow buried. It took a bit of excavation.”

Or as Guy Elmes, who collaborated with Greene, once told the author: “You’re a bit like a British documentary. When they are in any doubt, they cut to sea gulls; in your case, you cut immediately to God. Can we please avoid cutting to God?”

To adapt the novel into his taut, mesmerizing screenplay, Jordan reconfigured some key story points. For example, he changed the terms of a miracle, moving a birthmark from one character’s face to another. And he added a scene in Brighton that didn’t exist in the book.

What Love and Religion Have in Common

“The idea of calling it a religious movie would make me very squeamish,” says Jordan, a Catholic who began to question his faith as a teenager. But Jordan says he is transfixed by what love and religion have in common--an ephemeral, inexplicable core.

“It’s a deeply ironic book. I think you could argue it is not a Catholic book but a deeply divided novel,” Jordan says.

Greene, who became a Catholic in his early 20s, always claimed he wasn’t interested in preaching. More than religious content, Jordan says, “the book has an atmosphere you can smell, images that remain with you forever. I [thought] that it should look and feel like an erotic ghost story.”

Jordan’s film is drenched in rain and mist and much of the action takes place in darkness. Unlike the narrator of the book, who recounts past experiences, Bendrix tells the story in something closer to real time, trying to capture experience with only the ironic distance of the writerly mind. “I wanted to make a portrait of a writer and the art of writing,” Jordan says, “the story of a man who sits in a room with a typewriter obsessing about a romantic reality that’s no longer there. Every writer does and generally they get it terribly wrong.”

He uses flashback techniques, often repeating the same scene twice, to illustrate how many wrong sides there can be to a story. “In the end all of their explanations are inadequate for whatever was the full dimension of what went on,” Jordan says.

Jordan says that one of the reasons the earlier film version failed so miserably was its inability to paint a frank portrait of a highly erotic story. “One of the shocking things is that it’s a deeply erotic book full of yearning and loss that’s: a) written by a man and b) a middle-aged man,” says Jordan of Greene, who was 47 when the book was published. The character of Sarah, he points out, is unashamed of her passion, a fact that could not be conveyed by Kerr’s removal of an earring, the camera weakly panning the fireplace as sexual innuendo. A critic in the Manchester Guardian wrote in a 1955 review: “There were scenes in the book which, to put it discreetly, were far too intimate for translation to the screen.”

Director Jordan Found the Project Intimidating

What’s more, he went on, “there was, above all, that perennial problem of adaptation from novel to film. . . . In spite of all that may be said about this novelist’s ‘moving camera manner,’ the fact remains that when, as most patently in this novel, Mr. Greene’s words are exploring difficult spiritual realms of human motive and behavior the moving camera becomes a lumbering interpreter.”

Jordan says that the exercise of adapting an admired stylist and very English writer like Greene was intimidating, and forced him to use “a new dramatic voice.”

“He’s a very specific voice, Mr. Greene, and it’s very hard to approximate,” Jordan says. “Ideally you reach a point where you don’t know who’s written what. [But] I’m Irish, and our relationship to language is always one perhaps of overstatement. Writing the screenplay and using understatement, which Graham Greene, like many English novelists, does so beautifully--it’s an interesting cinematic device because the images have to bear that weight.”

But whether Greene, who died in 1991 at age 86, would have approved of the newest film adaptation of his work, it is likely he would have stayed true to his first love: In “Graham Greene: The Films of His Fiction,” Gene D. Phillips writes that Greene once told him, “In the long run the smile will be on the author’s face. For the book has the longer life.”