Conversions on the Page and on the Screen

In Graham Greene’s classic wartime novel, The End of the Affair (1951), we witness Sarah Miles’ remarkable conversion to Catholicism through the eyes of her former lover, Maurice Bendrix, who arguably also experiences a more reluctant yet no less convincing process of staggering toward belief. While Greene’s novel has been adapted twice into films (1955 and 1999) that in key ways miss the soul of the story, they also add to our understanding of these characters, showing the many ways conversion can play out in a modern culture often inhospitable to the human capacity for faith.

The End of the Affair follows two lovers in London during World War II: Sarah, who is married to a conventional civil servant named Henry, and Bendrix, a respected author who falls in love with Sarah almost by accident. They carry on a relationship for several years until Sarah abruptly ends it in a moment of crisis. When Bendrix comes to suspect that she has left him for another man, he instead gradually discovers that he was in fact “replaced” with God. While most of it is framed from Bendrix’s perspective (written in hindsight after the events have occurred), we do eventually gain access to Sarah’s thoughts by reading excerpts from her private journal. This technique enables the reader both to witness snatches of Bendrix’s evolving belief in God (if still an ambivalent one) and to follow Sarah’s inward journey as she remains unable to share her suffering with either of the men she loves. Sarah comes to a deeper love of God through love of others, while Bendrix (albeit in fits and starts) begins to recognize that “becom[ing] nearly human enough to think of another person’s trouble” could lead to a less hopeless life. Neither character’s growth is linear, by any means, but each one demonstrates a slowly deepening awareness of love that was first mirrored in their love for each other.

It is worth noting that Greene’s novel contains autobiographical elements of his own affairs, particularly with Catherine Walston. Although this additional context may enrich our reading of the novel, The End of the Affair is not a historical record of the author’s own life. It is fundamentally different from the “source events” and ultimately greater than the sum of its parts. Just as Greene manages to transfigure his own sordid passion and suffering into a story of faith distinct from his own, so too do film adaptations often transform their original source material into their own kinds of stories—bringing a sharper focus to one character, imagining a relationship from a particular point of view, or conjuring up images of was left between the lines. It would cheapen both Greene’s actual experiences and his novel if we were to assume that the novel is inferior because it does not faithfully replicate the actual events of his life. The same can be said of film adaptations.  

Each film treatment of The End of the Affair adds new dimensions to Greene’s already rich and complex narrative. Although it could be said that these films are more like “movies that happen to mention Catholicism” than distinctly “Catholic films,” they each nonetheless provide deeper opportunities for reflection on the process of conversion, particularly for those already familiar with the novel. The first film offers interesting glimpses into Sarah’s spiritual journey, while the second, which I will discuss in my second essay, plunges us head-first into Bendrix’s wrestling with God.

The 1955 version, starring Deborah Kerr, Van Johnson, and Peter Cushing, is not unusual for films of its time: sex is largely left to the imagination; the ending devolves into sentimentality; and halfhearted attempts at religious exploration remain superficial. When the film was released, Bosley Crowther, a famous twentieth-century film critic who was disappointed by the film’s revelation of Sarah’s new “rival” to Bendrix, commented in his review for the New York Times: “From here on, the question is simply how long it will take God to win. Even this inevitable resolution might be technically interesting, if Miss Coffee [the screenwriter] were able to explain it in simple and understandable terms. But she has taken her lead from the complex spiritual struggle set down by Mr. Greene, and her consequent stretching of the torment is involved and bewildering.” If this reviewer found the “stretching of the torment” to be merely “involved and bewildering,” it seems hard to imagine he would have cared much for the novel either. That Crowther seems to criticize The End of the Affair for not being primarily an entertaining love story makes sense considering that “his focus,” as his 1981 obituary in The Times put it, “was primarily on Hollywood and its appeals to popular taste.” His utter lack of sympathy for Sarah’s inner conflict betrays a diminished understanding of the nature of faith. Crowther ultimately concludes that the screenwriter’s decision to “[take] her lead from the complex spiritual struggle set down by Mr. Greene” results in a “dumfounding” and “[in]articulate” story that comes out “cluttered and cold.”

Is this a fair charge for this adaptation? In some areas, perhaps. By simplifying the original chronology of the novel, the film watches the affair unfold, dissolve, and revive in flashback form as Bendrix falls in love with, loses, and tries to win back Sarah. While remaining largely faithful to the literal content of the source text, viewers lose a certain level of complexity enabled by Greene’s manipulation of the timeline. This film also largely frames the tension in their relationship as a fairly straightforward case of jealousy poisoning love, as Bendrix is increasingly too preoccupied with his jealousy to value the love they share. While this is not “inaccurate” to the text, on the screen it often plays out in a two-dimensional way that misses the nuances of the conflict.

However, what might be most compelling about the 1955 version is the screenwriter’s additions, which were perhaps the target of Crowther’s disdain. Instead of learning indirectly about Sarah’s trips to the church and reading her prayers to God in her journal, we get to observe two scenes between Sarah and a parish priest: first, immediately after the bombing that causes her to give up Bendrix as a promise to God; and again when she is losing her resolve to stay away from him. As a result, Sarah’s conversion becomes more relational than it is in the novel, where we, along with Bendrix, see it only by reading her reflections. In fact, these scenes are our only opportunity in any version of the story (novel or film) to see Sarah entirely on her own terms. Even the journal passages that Bendrix reads are filtered through his choices of what to emphasize, skip over, etc., so the 1955 film version enables viewers to witness Sarah’s conversion more directly. Bendrix himself observes in the novel that Sarah must have left things out in her writing. Through this film, we have the opportunity to imagine what else must have happened to her.

Deborah Kerr plays this role well as we watch her drift through London alone, pulled toward God and the Church even as she wants to resist it. (As she writes in her journal six weeks after giving up Bendrix: “And believe me, God, I don’t believe in you yet, I don’t believe in you yet.”) In both scenes with the priest, he is simultaneously direct and compassionate toward Sarah in a way that seems to draw out her honesty and vulnerability. Although these scenes are brief—and certainly lack the deeper layers of spiritual exploration we see in the novel—they nonetheless tap into our imaginations in ways that let us sense how it felt for Sarah to wander into the church, to gaze up at the Sacred Heart of Christ, to feel compelled to light a candle in the presence of someone she was growing to love without quite understanding how. In other words, we get to imagine what it is like to work toward salvation.

The film also adds a scene between Sarah and Henry that gives further substance to the novel’s claim that Henry and Bendrix—the two men who supposedly loved her most in the world—failed ultimately to see her as the “good person” she was, unlike the other men who got to know her as she worked out her faith. In the movie, immediately after Sarah returns home from ending things with Bendrix and meeting the priest for the first time, she asks Henry what he believes and is so disheartened by his answer that she bursts into tears. We witness her emerging spiritual turmoil and how counter it runs to Henry’s simple perspective—“It’s all quite simple, really; one just does one’s best”—as she exclaims that God “made us who we are: not just eating, drinking, sleeping, or sitting in a church on Sunday.” Henry interprets her distress as simple shock from the bombs and offers her tea and rest. Although this scene is original to the film, we can easily imagine that it could have happened to these characters, and it sheds further insight on how the men closest to her were the least equipped to love her in the ways she needed as she sought to make sense of God’s love.

These elements of the 1955 film, therefore, add more perspective to Sarah’s experience and the key relationships in her life. By employing a more conventional storytelling framework, we are allowed to walk alongside her in ways that Bendrix wanted to do himself but couldn’t. In the next installment, I will turn to the more intimate portrait of Bendrix’s desperation and turmoil in the 1999 adaptation, starring Ralph Fiennes in a role, many viewers felt, he was meant to play.

Casie Dodd lives in Arkansas with her husband and two children. Her writing has appeared in This Land, Dappled Things, and other publications.