Across The Bridge by Graham Greene, 1938
The magic trick:
A premise that could be made into a thriller but instead is a pensive slow burn
This is a slow burn. Pretty pensive and, frankly, a little bit dull.
Strange then when I tell you that it was adapted as a thriller film 20 years later.
A man is being hunted by police in Juarez, Mexico – just across the bridge from El Paso, Texas. He’s committed some bank fraud and is hiding a million dollars.
And that probably does sound in line with a thriller. But that’s not really what Greene is after here. There aren’t any car chases or particularly tense moments.
He’s interested in creating a desolate, depressing vibe on which to sort out a philosophical irony – that it is often our very humanity, and not our criminal behavior, that does us in.
And that’s quite a trick on Greene’s part.
The selection:
And the next act again was pure comedy. I hesitate to think what this man worth a million was costing his country as they edged him out from this land and that. Perhaps somebody was getting tired of the business, and careless; anyway, they sent across two detectives, with an old photograph. He’d grown his silvery moustache since that had been taken, and he’d aged a lot, and they couldn’t catch sight of him. They hadn’t been across the bridge two hours when everybody knew that there were two foreign detectives in town looking for Mr. Calloway – everyone knew, that is to say, except Mr. Calloway, who couldn’t talk Spanish.
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