Graham Greene, famous as an Oscar®-nominated screenwriter as well as the author of novels with political, psychological and religious overtones, would have been 104 years old on October 2nd. Greene also distinguished himself as a journalist, short-story writer, film critic and playwright.

Born in Hertfordshire County, England, Greene began writing at an early age and published his first novel in 1929. During World War II he worked for the Secret Intelligence Service in London, where he gathered much material for his books.

Once famously sued by 20th Century Fox for his criticism of little Shirley Temple, Greene had many of his works adapted for the screen including Ministry of Fear (1944), a suspenseful story of espionage in London, directed by Fritz Lang; Confidential Agent (1945), a spy yarn set during the Spanish Civil War and starring Charles Boyer and Lauren Bacall; The Fugitive (1947), director John Ford's film version of Greene's novel The Power and the Glory, starring Henry Fonda as a priest in a Latin American country where religion has been outlawed; and The Comedians (1967), a tale of political intrigue in Haiti that boasts an all-star cast headed by Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Alec Guinness and Lillian Gish. Travels with My Aunt (1972), although not faithful to Greene's picaresque novel, gave Oscar®-nominated Maggie Smith one of her most flamboyant film roles.

TCM's salute includes Greene's most celebrated original screenplay, The Third Man (1949), which, with documentary-like precision, perfectly captured the fractured Europe of the post-World War II period and provided Orson Welles, as the mysterious Harry Lime, with an unforgettable character.

We'll also be airing Brighton Rock (1947), in which a young Richard Attenborough plays a hunted killer who has murdered a rival gangster; The Fallen Idol (1948) starring little Bobby Henrey as a boy who believes the family servant (Ralph Richardson) has murdered his wife and tries to protect him; The Quiet American (1957) with Audie Murphy as a U.S. representative caught between Communists and foreign interests in Indochina; The End of the Affair (1955) featuring Deborah Kerr and Van Johnson as illicit lovers; Our Man in Havana (1960), a satire in which Alec Guinness plays a vacuum cleaner salesman in pre-Castro Cuba.

by Roger Fristoe