The seven deadly sins of Hollywood (1957)

THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS OF HOLLYWOOD But Greene always has his film rights to fall back on. Unlike Shaw, he is not too fussy about what happens to his books when they become films, though from time to time he does make an effort — usually a futile one — to get one of his stories onto the screen intact. Practically every book he has ever written has been filmed; The Man Within, This Gun for Hire, Confidential Agent, The Heart of the Matter, The Power and the Glory, The End of the Affair, Brighton Rock, The Fallen Idol, are some of them. "The only one I really liked," said Greene without any bitterness, "was one very few other people seemed to have liked, The Confidential Agent with Charles Boyer." "Why," I asked him, "is it that your stories are invariably ruined when they are filmed? After all, you are an extremely filmic writer." "Oh," said Greene, "it's probably that when people read my stories they think they would make good films, and then when they come to do them they realise they won't, and so they are obliged to change them." I thought this an extremely generous attitude for an author to take, and not really fair to himself. "There is also the question of censorship," he said. " Most of my stories wouldn't get by the censor in their original form. The Fallen Idol was a good film, I thought. But of course it was a completely different story to The Basement Room, on which it was based. In the film you couldn't have an innocent man being hanged. But the change in this case was made with my full approval. "If anyone is to blame, it's me. The Quiet American is going to be done by Joseph L. Mankiewicz — I don't know how they'll do that. I don't suppose they can film it the way it is written. They'll probably make it so that it looks as if the American was being bamboozled all the time by the Communists or something. ..." An American who had joined the conversation began 194