“A house in Kensington and £2,000 a year.” Sounds a bit like some thing from the pen of Muriel Spark, doesn’t it? Well, you’d have to sell the house these days. When I started in the City I never aspired to a residence in Kensington but I thought that I could jog along on £4,000 a year. We have all been robbed by inflation. The quote is from a film made in 1959, when I was five. Rather a good cast: Alec Guinness, Noël Coward, Maureen O’Hara, Burl Ives, Ralph Richardson and (uncredited and in a non-speaking role) John Le Mesurier.
The film is Our Man In Havana, directed by Carol Reed. It is funnier than Graham Greene’s novel on which it is based and which had only been published the year before. Here is an exchange between Ralph Richardson and Noël Coward : “that looks like a wilted orchid” – “yes sir, Pan-American gave it to me with dinner last night” -” what an extraordinary thing to do.” It was shot on location in Havana and Fidel Castro met the cast; 111 minutes of cinematic bliss.
Graham Greene adapted his book for the screen. He was an early admirer of Reed’s work when he was reviewing films for The Spectator in the 1930s, recognising that Reed “has more sense of the cinema than most veteran British directors”.
I rate Greene as the second best British writer of the 20th century. Evelyn Waugh gets in ahead of him. I will let you choose the Also Rans but I hope you will consider D H Lawrence and P G Wodehouse.