Feb 232008
Surrounded by hype and levelling, what a relief to read something like this.
The cinema in Teneriffe was showing a film which had been adapted from one of my own novels. It had been an instructive and rather painful experience to see it shown. The direction was incompetent, the photography undistinguished, the story sentimental. If there was any truth in the original it had been carefully altered, if anything was left unchanged it was because it was because it was untrue. By what was unchanged I could judge and condemn my own novel: I could see clearly what was cheap and banal enough to fit the cheap and banal film.
Graham Greene, Journey without Maps, 1936. The film must have been Stamboul Train, 1932.