Jeremy Lewis
Early on in the film of The Third Man, the British intelligence officer played by Trevor Howard offers Harry Lime’s American friend (played by Joseph Cotten) a glass of ‘Smolka’ vodka. I can’t find this brand online, but I suspect that Graham Greene – who wrote the script as well as the novella on which the film is based – was paying a debt rather than promoting a particular make of vodka.
One of the pleasures of reading – and writing – biographies is encountering minor characters who are riveting in themselves, and often flit from one subject’s life to another. A Viennese Jew, Peter Smolka, was just such a figure. Early in the 1930s he was enlisted as a Soviet agent, after which he moved to London, where he changed his surname to Smollett and worked as a journalist, writing a well-received book about his travels in the Arctic, and founding an unsuccessful press agency with Kim Philby. David Astor and his father, Waldorf, thought highly of him – so much so that at one stage Waldorf considered making him the editor of the family newspaper, the Observer. He found a job with the Russian section of the Ministry of Information after the Soviet Union joined the war on the Allied side; he was energetic on Russia’s behalf, and when –T S Eliot having already turned the book down for Faber – Jonathan Cape submitted Orwell’s
Animal Farm to the Ministry for its approval, he successfully urged the publisher to turn it down on the grounds that it would damage Anglo-soviet relations (Secker & Warburg eventually went ahead with it) . After the war he returned to Vienna as the Times correspondent, and resumed the name of Smolka; and it was there that he met Graham Greene, and told him about the lethal penicillin scam which forms the subject matter of The Third Man. I once asked Lord Weidenfeld, also a Viennese Jew, whether he had known Smolka. ‘Of course,’ the great man replied, ‘a cousin of mine.’ For tiresome medical reasons, I’ve been confined to barracks for the past few months, with occasional forays to hospital and Richmond Park. I’m too tired to read as much as I’d like to, but I spend a great deal of time re-watching the films of my youth, The Third Man among them. Recent viewings have included Cavalcanti’s 1942 masterpiece
Went the Day Well?, also based on a Graham Greene story, which describes how a remote English village is taken over by Germans masquerading as British soldiers; and the marvellous if sea-sick inducing The Cruel Sea. Readers may remember how, at the beginning of the film, Jack Hawkins has been made the captain of a corvette, and is joined by three young recruits, none of whom has any sea-going experience, but all of whom are thoroughly good eggs: one was a barrister in civilian life, one a journalist, and one worked in a bank. All three are mercilessly bullied by the detestable first lieutenant, played by Stanley Baker, and are hugely relieved when he is laid low by a duodenal ulcer and is seen no more. At this stage we learn that he was previously a used car salesman, and – English snobbery being what it is – all is instantly explained.
What is it about used car salesmen that makes them synonymous with a seedy infamy? George Cole in Minder was the most notorious (if comical) practitioner of recent years, but I remember how the most incompetent literary agent of his day – a stout, pallid figure, with smarmed-back hair and a black moustache – was invariably dismissed by the denizens of the literary world as being ‘just like a used car salesman’. I don’t imagine Eric Ambler, who wrote the script of The Cruel Sea, or the rather grand publishers who derided the world’s worst literary agent, had ever met a real-life used car salesman – but the damage had been done long ago. What is the explanation? Being able to choose which books or newspapers one wants to read, which music to listen to, which political opinions (if any) to adhere to, which career to follow, is an essential ingredient of a free and civilised society, but there are large areas of life in which I am perfectly happy to have no choice whatsoever. We’re constantly being urged to spend our days monitoring the charges levied by the suppliers of water, gas and electricity, and to switch from one to another if they seem too high: but who beyond a handful of nerds has the time to waste on such a boring activity? It makes me pine for the old days when one company had a monopoly on a particular service – however wasteful and inefficient it might have been (within reason, of course).