Ian Dalrymple produced and received a screenplay credit forThe Heart of the Matter.  Dalrymple had previously been involved in the major unfinished Crown Film Unit project Morning Noon and Night, which attempted to fashion a progressive representation of the British empire war effort (Stollery 2011).  The adaptation of The Heart of the Matter is similarly marked by an attempt to liberalise the representation of an important African character within the film.  This aspect of adaptation was in some respects more radical than the change to the ending, which simply altered the manner of Scobie's death. Scobie’s faithful African servant Ali, who is murdered in the novel, is allowed to live in the film.

In the novel Scobie’s self-obsession leads him to suspect Ali of having conspired against him.  In an abrupt reversal, Ali suddenly transforms in Scobie’s mind from a pacified, obedient native into a dangerous, duplicitous adversary.  Scobie arranges to let Yusef handle the matter, not knowing this will result in Ali being murdered.  When Scobie realises what has happened, he remonstrates: ‘You served me and I did this to you.  You were faithful to me, and I wouldn’t trust you’ (Greene, 269).  This momentary jolt to Scobie’s self-obsession does not lead him to change his perspective on his immediate relationships or on the wider colonial context.  As the narrative progresses it simply becomes another way station on his road to suicide.

The film adaptation of The Heart of the Matter eliminates this part of the novel and ends with Scobie’s ‘boy’ Ali cradling him in a pietà composition.  Their relationship is represented throughout the film in terms of Scobie’s firm yet affectionate paternalism matched by Ali’s selfless devotion.  It offers a positive counterweight to negative representations of Africans elsewhere in the film, most clearly the street gang’s unexplained violence which emanates spontaneously from a ‘bad place’ within Freetown.  Scobie and Ali’s relationship in the film version of The Heart of the Matter conforms in broad terms to the ‘liberal position’ Christine Geraghty has identified in a number of British ‘Commonwealth’ films of the 1950s, such as Simba (Brian Desmond Hurst, 1955) and Windom’s Way (Ronald Neame, 1957).  This position is ‘marked by an extreme emphasis on empathy, care and healing.  It is as if the good white characters must prove their right to take part in Commonwealth affairs by demonstrating their capacity for sacrifice, their unselfish goodness and their capacity to win, through goodness, the respect that had previously been demanded by the assertion of power’  (Geraghty, 131).  For Geraghty the liberal position in these 1950s films ultimately displaces ‘the question of political rights into one of humanitarian largesse’ (Geraghty, 131-2).  

Despite their discussions about changes to the ending, white British metropolitan film reviewers at the time of The Heart of the Matter’s initial release, and academic commentators since then, have not commented upon the implications of Ali being brought back to life, his role within the film’s narrative and conclusion, or the possible political resonances of this particular narrative within late colonial contexts.  Insofar as these commentators have focused solely upon the moral and religious dilemma associated with Scobie, or his individual undoing by the tropics, they replicated the self-focused cultural insularity this white character displays in the source novel.      

Martin Stollery