THE ULTIMATE CHALLENGE - PUTTING GREENE ON SCREEN

LAST week it was announced that the hot young Hollywood actor, Brendan Fraser, will star alongside Michael Caine in a $30-million adaptation of Graham Greene's classic 1955 novel The Quiet American, scripted by Christopher Hampton.

It is not Hampton's first visit to Greeneland. Back in 1983, he adapted Greene's The Honorary Consul for another emerging star - Richard Gere. But, for scriptwriters, Greene had always been a hard nut to crack.

Neil Jordan, who last year adapted and directed a movie version of Greene's autobiographical novel, The End of the Affair, elaborates: "When you read his stuff it seems very cinematic because you can touch and even smell the atmosphere he creates. Often Greene has great beginnings, but then the development of them is terribly interior as they will tend to centre more and more on moral dilemmas. That's probably why he hasn't been filmed well." The one or two exceptions to Jordan's rule have one thing in common - the scripts were written by Greene himself.

The film writer Charles Drazin whose book, In Search of The Third Man, traces how one Greene script became a classic of the silver screen. "The advantage was that The Third Man was always intended to be a film, even though it started out as a short story," he reveals. He adds: "Greene had solid partnerships. With Alexander Korda, the producer, and then with the director, Carol Reed." As a result, unlike Hampton, Greene was protected from studio interference. "Korda's role was vital; without him Greene would have been pulled every which way by the producer David Selznick."

Having provided the money for the making of The Third Man, Selznick felt he had the right to give advice - which he did via 72 memos from Hollywood.

"Listen boys," he told Reed and Greene at a script conference on the back lot of United Artists, "Who the hell is going to go a film called The Third Man? I'm no writer and you are, but what we want is something like A Night in Vienna." "Graham and I will think about it," Reed muttered - "a phrase," Greene later remarked, "which I was to hear Reed frequently repeat."

The Third Man was, literally, a movie of its time. "Greene conceived the idea in January, 1948," says Drazin. "He went to Vienna in February, wrote the script with Reed in June. In the meantime, the film was being cast. By October they began shooting, and by December they had left Vienna." Compare that with the The Quiet American, a 45- year-old novel set in 1950s French Indo-China in its current guise as a "multimillion dollar production" which has already taken 10 years just to reach Hampton's desk.

Yet in one way the timing of The Quiet American is on Hampton's side. The book stands as a stark warning to postwar America, which Hampton spells out as: "Watch out. If you continue like this in Vietnam, you'll be in a mess that you'll never get out of."

Prophetic words that Hollywood was not prepared to accept back in 1955 when Greene spurned a United Artists production of the novel as "complete treachery". Then, the unwitting villain, CIA stooge Alden Pyle, was played by cowboy star Audie Murphy as a freedom fighter rather than as a state terrorist - which, Greene declared, "turned my book upside down".

lIn Search of The Third Man by Charles Drazin, published by Methuen, 9.99 A revised edition of Travels in Greeneland: The Cinema of Graham Greene by Quentin Falk is published by Reynold and Hearne on 27 November at 14.95.

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