Hell in Haiti

Whether in devastated wartime London or an overgrown jungle throbbing to the heart of the matter, the landscape of Graham Greene's novels is inexorably arid and sere. Yet in the midst of a life that is rather worse than purgatory and scarcely better than hell, his characters are touched by a vagrant grace. The Comedians, for which he wrote a script based on his novel, is Greeneland all over again, this time in Haiti. Off a ship and into the damned, doomed country walk three anonyms: Brown, Jones and Smith.

Beneath their drab masques are three highly colored personae. Smith (Paul Ford) is a potato-faced professional vegetarian from the Midwest who plans to convert the natives to a diet of nut-burgers and Yeastrol. Jones (Alec Guinness) is a breezy, sleazy gun smuggler, all winks and leers, forever dreaming of deals. Brown (Richard Burton), in Haiti to reclaim his late mother's hotel, is a lapsed Catholic, a cynic, a middle-aged burned-out case. He is also a ready target for temptation, as substantially embodied in a Latin American ambassador's wife (Elizabeth Taylor). She waits for Burton in her car on a highway--evidently the most private place in Haiti--where they hungrily make love.

Greene's fictional Haiti, which seems not very far removed from the real one, is a Black Power station brutally run by "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his swaggering Gestapo, the Tontonx Maconte. Eventually, Ford realizes that in order to survive in Haiti he would have to become a vegetable himself; revolted by the wretched beggars and savage beatings, he escapes to the safety of the U.S. Burton envies the American's innocence, but he has been affected and infected by Ford's passion to obliterate evil. Thus, when Guinness flees the police and appeals for help, Burton cannot refuse. "I like you," he says, surprised--"God knows why." Next morning the Tontons offer Burton $2,000 and freedom to reveal the whereabouts of his colleague. The weary, dreary reply is inevitable: "Inflation is everywhere. It used to be 30 pieces of silver." Once he has refused to play Judas, the only role open to him is Jesus.

Running two hours and 40 minutes, The Comedians has everything but economy, and Director Peter Glenville has tarried with a story that might have been twice as good at half the length. Unlike the novel, in which Greene's obsessive concern with man kind's spiritual underworld is subdued, his scenario seems as overtly moralistic as a passion play.

The Haitian government would not allow the moviemakers in. When he learned the locale was to be Dahomey, Africa, the Duvalier representative protested formally. Yet French Photographer Henri Decae's location shots offer a remarkable re-creation of a land where images of voodoo gods and the Virgin Mary are worshiped at the same rituals. The cast of supporting villains and victims--led by Peter Ustinov--is uniformly excellent. As a fading beauty with a German accent, Taylor is reasonably effective, but Burton, playing an exhausted anti-hero in the same style as his memorable The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, seems to have stepped from the pages of the novel.

Ironically, the film's most stirring moments are not its overheated love scenes but the brief encounters between Burton and Guinness. In one, Guinness, a short day's journey from death, recounts his wasted life of lies in a graveyard retreat. Priestlike, Burton answers the tortured confession with a symbolic absolution. At such moments of transcendent drama--and there are enough to make it worthwhile--The Comedians is easily forgiven its other sins.

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