“The programme at the cinema was supposed to start at nine, but . . .”
It is spring of 1938 and Graham Greene is in Las Casas, Mexico where he is commissioned to write about the religious situation:
At last the Queen [of the Spring Fair] climbed onto the stage with her maids and courtiers, buxom and brown-eyed and gold-toothed. The girls sat on hard straight chairs in front of an absurd Edwardian drawing room set of cardboard tables and cut-out ferns . . . A poet read an ode into a microphone, the brothers Something-or-Other played interminably on the marimba, and somebody made an oration on the petroleum situation. . . Then there was another speech and more marimba playing and a raffle for free cinema seats which went on for half an hour, and at last the great film, specially brought to Las Casas for the Spring Fair: Warner Baxter and Alice Faye in a faded backstage musical. Incomprehensible situations passed across a flickery screen, the lights of Broadway, complicated renunciations. They became more than ever fantastic translated into Spanish. The audience never laughed once; they sat in silence. Only the Queen of the Fair sometimes smiled. . . Alice Faye’s fair and unformed face was projected in enormous detail, weeping enormous tears; her man had failed, taken to drink, while she was featured over Broadway in neon signs and wept for lost love. This was a stigmata they couldn’t understand, but I was grateful for the darkness and the torch songs. . . The Lawless Roads by Graham Greene. William Heinemann, 1939.)
Do any of my readers/followers recognize the film Graham Greene saw in Mexico?
COMING SOON
Two Students of Prague
The Student of Prague (1913)
The Student of Prague (1926)
Next FRIDAY Post May 28
Until then,
Enjoy a movie!
Rick
ricksflicks 