A los maestros con cariño.../XII

El escritor (novelista, dramaturgo, cuentista y guionista de cine) Graham Greene (1904-1991) ejerció la crítica de cine de 1935 a 1941 en The Spectator, Night and Day y Sight and Sound. No sólo fue uno de los más grandes cinecríticos de la década de los 30 sino uno de los mejores de la historia. Punto.

Greene, como crítico fílmico, presumió siempre una pluma certera, filosa, lúcida... y provocadora, como en esta celebérrima reseña de Wee Willie Winkie (Dir. John Ford, 1937), que le valió una demanda de la casa productora Fox y de la protagonista de la cinta, la super-estrella de nueve años Shirley Temple. Hela aquí (los adjetivos polémicos, que provocaron la demanda, en amarillo):

"The owners of a child star are like leaseholders -their property diminishes in value every year. Time's chariots is ath their back; before them acres of anonimity. What is Jackie Coogan now but a matrimonial squabble? Miss Shirley Temple's case, though, has peculiar interest: infancy is her disguise, hear appeal is more secret and more adult. Already two years ago, she was a fancy little piece (real childhood, I think, went out after The Littlest Rebel). In Captain January she wore trousers with the mature suggestiveness of a Dietrich: hear neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap-dance: her eyes had a sidelong searching coquetry. Now in Wee Willie Winkie, wearing short kilts, she is completely totsy. Watch her swaggering stride across the Indian barrack-square: hear the gasp of excited expectation from the antique audience when the sergeant's palm is raised: watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity. Adult emotions of love and grief glissade across the mask of childhood, a childhood skin-deep.

It is clever, but it cannot last. Her admirers -middle-aged men and clergymen- respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of the well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their inteligence and their desire...".

Publicado originalmente en Night and Day, el 28 de octubre de 1937, tomado de The Graham Greene Film Reader (Ed. Applause Books, 1995).