THE HEART OF THE MATTER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 808, 21 January 1955, Page 20

THE HEART OF THE MATTER

(London Films) She lifted her worn, frank, childish face and said, "I like you so much." "I like you, too,’ he said gravely. They both had an immense sense of security: they were friends who could never be anything else than friends. . . HAT was the beginning of the affair around which Graham ) Greene wrote The Heart of the Matter. Later Helen and Scobie were to discover that what they had both thought was safety had been "the camouflage of an enemy": in spite of her dead husband and his living wife, they found they were in love. The intolerable dilemma Scobie faced -loving in different ways two womenis at the heart also of the fine film George More O’Ferrall has made from Mr. Greene’s novel. In wartime Sierra Leone Scobie is an assistant- police commissioner with a complaining wife. Though no longer "in love" with her, he is faithful to a private pledge to do all he can to make her happy, even when it means borrowing from a racketeer so that she can leave the colony. While she is absent a friendship, born of kindness and pity, for a young war refugee, ends in hopeless love and adultery and in the corruption of the incorruptible Scobie-as much as anything else through his efforts to save his wife from suffering. The end of the film is spoiled, for though Scobie clearly intends to take his life, which he does in the book, he is interrupted by a brawl and later found dying; and we miss the last telling page of dialogue about the quality of God’s mercy. With this exception the film is extraordinarily faithful to the Greene textmany of the scenes have been lifted almost as they were written-and it also captures much of the atmosphere and setting-though not, I think, the typical Greene seediness which clings particularly to the early part of the book. As a piece of film making it is highly com-

| petent and has some fine moments. On this level, however, it’s the quality of the acting that really impresses. Trevor Howard gets right inside the part of Scobie; Maria Schell makes a fine Helen, treading unfalteringly (the scene in the car, for example, when she tries to say goodbye) a razor edge of emotion; and Elizabeth Allan is completely right in the difficult part of the complaining wife who comes back prepared to make a new start. The relatively minor parts also are well filled. There may be some who feel unmoved by this film because they don’t share Mr. Greene’s -and Scobie’s faith: As it happens, hell and damnation don’t mean to me what they mean to

Scobie, and so with all the sympathy in the world I couldn’t completely share the religious crisis he went through, But I don’t think it’s. necessary that I should. His religion apart, Scobie, it seems to me, was a. fairly typical "good" man-a man with a consciencewhom it isn’t easy to blame for the situation in which he found himself. He didn’t want to hurt anybody. He lacked the certainty that a stronger belief would have given him. He seemed more at home with everyday right and wrong than with good and evil. In the event, it could no doubt be argued, that was his undoing. But it is all this, I think, which makes his dilemma almost unbearably moving and real, and at the same time easier for most of us to understand and share, giving his story, even in an age of widespread doubt and unbelief, a universal significance.