Given that many of Greene’s novels were adapted to sound film beginning with The Orient Express in 1934 and that he served as film critic for The Spectator throughout the 1930s, his work was particularly attuned to the medium.

2 Laura Marcus, for instance, points out that Greene’s 1934 novel It’s a Battlefield as well as Brighton Rock evidence the influence of the sound cinematic medium (428-29). Recent interest in sonic modernity has inspired inquiry into the effect of sound film on novel form in the 1920s and 1930s. Bazin specifically refers to visual form-montage, play with time-but Brighton Rock particularly illuminates the relationship between these media through soundscape.

what it has already lent the novel” in terms of form (64). For Bazin, the “ultracinematographic” goes beyond questions of fidelity to evidence a cinematic “recouping. André Bazin cites the 1947 film version of Brighton Rock as an example of the “ultracinematographic” that dialectically adopts a “novel-like style” (64). Thus, the novel, which became (and was likely written as) a source text for film adaptation itself, resonates with the representational possibilities of sound cinema. Greene’s 1938 novel suggests the influence of sound cinema as it depicts the transformation of voice through audio technologies. These texts allow us to articulate how the recursive treatment of gender in the classical cinematic soundscape can be twisted through narrative demands and the ironies of adaptation. 1 The novel and 1947 film versions of Brighton Rock pose an intermedial challenge to the very classical cinematic soundscapes they invoke. Produced and directed by John and Roy Boulting from Greene’s and Terence Rafferty’s script, the 1947 film adaptation of Brighton Rock draws from this rich novelistic soundscape to render the gendered positions of its central characters even more ambiguous. These voices and the technologies that disseminate them elide with the gendered tropes of classical cinema, though the sexual anxiety of Pinkie, the adolescent anti-hero at the heart of the novel, troubles familiar representations.

The devastating revelation promised by this gramophone aptly ends a novel in which microphones, loudspeakers, and radios detach voices from their sources to construct a multilayered soundscape. Graham Greene’s 1938 novel Brighton Rock famously concludes before the “worst horror of all” as the teenage Rose prepares to put a gramophone needle to a vulcanite disc that contains her dead husband’s last words. × Current About Archive Submit Editorial Board Salisbury University From “The Worst Horror of All” to “I Love You”: Gender and Voice in the Cinematic Soundscapes of Brighton Rock Laurel Harris

Brighton rock by graham greene