Background
In 1938, Greene was forced to flee his native England in advance of a lawsuit that 20th Century Fox brought against him for a review he wrote of the Shirley Temple movie Wee Willie Winkie in Night and Day magazine. Wrote Greene, "...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 that is only 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 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."
Greene's friend, the Brazilian-born film director Alberto Cavalcanti, wrote:
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.
This is a myth, however. Night and Day ceased publication because of the lawsuit, and Greene was never threatened with imprisonment. He did not go to Mexico as an exile. He went to Mexico from January to May 1938 in order to research and write The Lawless Roads, a nonfiction account of the persecution of the Catholic church in Mexico, from which his novel, The Power and the Glory, would develop. He had been planning this Mexican trip since 1936, and the lawsuit, which cost him UK₤600, did make him happy to be out of Britain for awhile. However, there was never a threat of imprisonment, and in any case he was back in England in five months.
Read more about this topic: The Power And The Glory
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