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Graham Greene's travels to Mexico in the late 1930s are part of literary folklore, giving birth to his masterpiece The Power and the Glory about a "whiskey priest" and the policeman sent to hunt him down.
Widely regarded as one of the finest British writers of the last century and a committed Catholic, Greene was sent to Mexico by the Vatican to document Government-led persecution - or so it was thought.
Now, a sensational new theory has emerged - that Greene actually fled to Mexico to avoid being sent to prison over his infamous libel trial concerning the child star Shirley Temple.
The amazing claim is made in the lost autobiography of Greene's close friend, the cinema pioneer Alberto Cavalcanti, who died in 1982 aged 85.
The discovery of the biography, and letters and other papers belonging to the film director has sent a frisson of excitement throughout the film world.
Cavalcanti had an enormous influence on British and French cinema. In France he worked closely with Jean Renoir; in the 1930s and 1940s he worked in London and directed several Ealing films, including Greene's Went the Day Well? He is recognised as the creative force behind the studio's unique style.
His papers are with the special collections at the British Film Institute (BFI) archive in Berkhamsted, where they are being catalogued.
Cavalcanti's biography, to which the Independent on Sunday has had exclusive access, contains numerous anecdotes about the artistic community in Paris and London. But it is the few lines about his friend Greene that will cause the history books to be rewritten.
In 1937 Greene was a film reviewer for Night and Day magazine. In a review of the Shirley Temple film Wee Willie Winkie, he wrote: "Her admirers - middle-aged men and clergymen - respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire."
Twentieth Century Fox sued on behalf of Temple, then 8, on the grounds that, as Cavalcanti wrote, Greene had implied she played deliberately to "a public of licentious old men, ready to enjoy the fine flavour of such an unripe, charming little creature".
He added: "Thanks to vigilant, quick-witted friends, Graham was warned that the Americans producing the film had introduced a writ of libel against him, meaning that not only would the backers of Night and Day pay a large fine, but he, Graham himself, faced a prison sentence.
"The only solution was to find a country without extradition. They chose Mexico and our poor Graham went away very quickly indeed. Very likely Shirley Temple never learned that it was partly thanks to her that, during his exile, Graham Greene wrote one of his best books," Cavalcanti said.
The trial was held on March 22, 1938. Greene had left for Mexico on January 29 and did not return to Britain until May. The judge, who fined the magazine a crippling £3500, lamented it was a shame that Greene was out of the court's reach, says Cavalcanti.
Janet Moat, head of special collections at the the BFI, said: "It was very exciting to get the papers. For us Cavalcanti has always been a bit of a Holy Grail. The papers fill a gap in 20th-century film history."
- Independent
