It was a bit of an exaggeration. With neither film nor book money coming in quickly enough, he was already back in journalism. Ten years earlier, Greene had taken a job as a sub-editor on the court pages of the Times. Later came (anonymous) film reviews for that paper's entertainment section. His first novel, The Man Within, was published in 1929, while he was still on the Times. Five more came, with limited success, between then and 1935, when he rather casually took up the job which would see him become a regular face at preview screenings.
By then a book reviewer for the Spectator, he suggested - at a drinks party, after that "dangerous third martini" - that he become their film critic. They accepted, and one of the most incisive writers on film (Philip French: "the most ferocious I've ever come across") was launched.
That was June 1935. Within just three years, his reputation went far and wide, with one aggrieved film-maker sending him a piece of shit enclosed in a letter. By 1938, he was also contributing to Night and Day magazine, and found himself accused of writing, in a review of Wee Willie Winkie, that 20th-Century Fox had procured Shirley Temple for immoral purposes. The nine-year-old Miss Temple ("infancy is her disguise, her appeal is more secret and adult") won her case, and Greene had to pay £500 of the £3,500 costs.
Other stars fared little better, but Greene wasn't into bitchiness alone. He also tried to put across an idea of the cinema that would return it to the true populism of the Elizabethan stage, to vibrancy in place of gentility. But in spite of renown, those "four and a half years of watching films several times a week", those "mornings in the dark", were really a means of escape from novel writing - "escape from the hellish problems of construction in Chapter Six, from the secondary character who obstinately refuses to come alive, escape for an hour and a half from the melancholy which falls inexorably round the novelist when he has lived for too many months on end in his own private world".
With the coming of the second World War, Greene's reviewing activity began to tail off. It was partly the welcome excitement of the war, but he seems to have felt tarnished, as if he were a patent examiner who'd seen too many inventions that failed.
Post-war, for Greene as novelist and screenwriter supplying the film industry, there was still much invention to come, but the appeal of this would tire too: "I've made films in the forties, fifties and sixties. But the time comes when one's enthusiasm begins to slacken. One's left with only enough enthusiasm for one's own work, which is writing novels . . ."
Film, however, was also at the centre of that "own work", in Greene's consolidation of the use of cinematic style in fiction: the "new habit of narrative" as Evelyn Waugh called it in a review of The Heart of the Matter. Greene himself, in words that no contemporary novelist can afford to ignore, put it like this:
"When I describe a scene, I capture it with the moving eye of the cine-camera rather than the photographer's eye - which leaves it frozen. In this precise domain I think the cinema has influenced me. Authors like Walter Scott or the Victorians were influenced by paintings and constructed their backgrounds as though they were static and came from the hands of a Constable. I work with a camera, following my characters and their movements."
The Beginning of the End of the Affair is on BBC2 on January 18th. The End of the Affair opens on February 4th