Odd Man Out (1947)

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Paul Tatara via TCM:

Director Carol Reed is most often hailed as the creative force behind The Third Man (1949), a highly stylized meditation on friendship and post-War morality. Many critics, however, feel that Odd Man Out (1947), which was filmed two years prior to The Third Man, is Reed's real masterpiece. Though just as imaginatively photographed and edited as The Third Man, Odd Man Out is anchored by James Mason's breathtaking performance as a critically wounded I.R.A. agent who encounters both tenderness and betrayal while on the run from the authorities. Viewers who are only familiar with Mason's later work in such films as Lolita (1962) and Georgy Girl (1966) will be startled by his forcefulness in this role. This is a character, and a movie, that you won't soon forget.

Reed, who optioned F.L. Green's Odd Man Out in 1945, felt that there was a shortage of talented screenwriters in England, so he insisted that Green himself should adapt the book for the screen. Green was flattered by the suggestion, but had never written a script before, and was leery of flying solo with so much at stake. Acting against his own instincts, Reed then hired R.C. Sherriff to more or less keep the project on track while Green got his bearings. Reed also tinkered with the script himself, but that was to be expected, since he had a hand in virtually every aspect of his productions. This tendency to spread his talents around was one of the reasons Reed, who could have used the financial support of a major studio, long resisted working on the Hollywood assembly line.

Reed's European investors, not surprisingly, were concerned with making movies that would appeal to American as well as British audiences. Reed, however, felt that British filmmakers should stick to the sort of material that they knew best. Although the politics of Odd Man Out would be somewhat difficult for Americans to follow, Reed was convinced that viewers would respond to any narrative, so long as it was perceived to be honest. He noted that, in the past, Brits had failed at the American box office when they tried to pander. "The films were not genuine and did not ring true," he said, "and the American public realized it. Instead of making pictures for a country we don't understand, we must make pictures our way."

Apparently, belief in the British film industry had reached a low ebb by the late 1940s. Mason felt that there were only a handful of worthwhile directors in England at the time, and Reed was among them. Thus, he was thrilled when the filmmaker approached him to play the lead role in Odd Man Out. Reed was famous for giving his actors free reign while "discovering" their characters, and Mason obviously ran with the chance. He delivered one of the key performances of 1940s cinema, and it permanently solidified his standing as an actor of international prominence. Mason's co-star in the film, Dan O'Herlihy, noted years later that "...James was almost too intellectual for his own good, but he had much more depth than most. Although he wasn't very emotional he could indicate emotion on screen superbly: there was an austere vulnerability about him which could be immensely powerful." Certainly, viewers around the world latched onto the complex gravitas of Mason's portrayal.

It seems, however, that Reed was never completely satisfied with Odd Man Out. Years after its release, while watching the picture with screenwriter Ben Hecht, Reed decided that about 30 seconds of footage needed to be removed from the print. He offered a startled projectionist 100 pounds to take a pair of scissors to the offending seconds, but the man wisely refused. God only knows which 30 seconds were bothering Reed. The film seems close to perfection to everyone else.

John Hill via Film Reference:

Unlike much of the British cinema's wartime output, the film has little truck with social realism. Formally, the film is heavily indebted to both German Expressionism and French poetic realism—indeed, its ending is practically a copy of Julien Duvivier's Pepé le Moko (1936)—and has much in common with its similarly stylised postwar US counterpart, the film noir. This is evident in the film's approach to both plot and visual presentation. Like classical tragedy, the film's story is concerned with the irreversible consequences of an initial error. Johnny McQueen (James Mason) is shot following an illadvised, and armed, mill robbery and is left to wander the city at night. Despite the efforts of others to save him, his fate is already sealed and, in a moving climax, Johnny meets his death in the arms of the woman he loves, while his last remaining hope of escape, the ship, is seen to sail off without him.

This aura of doom is reinforced by the film's iconography (the recurring appearance of the Albert Clock, the deteriorating weather) as well as its distinctive visual style. As in film noir, both lighting and composition are used to striking effect. Lighting is predominantly low-key, creating strong chiaroscuro contrasts and vivid patterns of light and shadow. Compositions tend to be imbalanced and claustrophobic, with characters either cramped into enclosed interiors (as at Granny's) or rendered small by their surrounding environment (as in many of the night scenes). The use of a tilted camera (almost a Reed trademark), acute angles, and wide-angle lenses adds to these effects, especially in the chase sequences involving Dennis (Robert Beatty) as he races down long and imprisoning alley-ways or clambers his way through a maze of scaffolding. While such scenes as these, with their imaginative combination of real locations and expressive visual design, have retained an air of freshness, the film's resort to full-blooded expressionism in its subjective sequences has worn less well. Although much admired at the time, the attempts to visualize Johnny's hallucinations by superimposing faces onto beer bubbles or by putting paintings into flight now seem simply belaboured (and, no doubt, represent the type of device which led Andrew Sarris to include Reed, somewhat unkindly, in his category of "less than meets the eye").

Debate over the merit of Reed's technique, however, has also tended to discourage too close an inspection of the meanings which the film projects (although the documentarist Edgar Anstey did attack the film at the time of its release for apparently importing French existentialism). For while the film's opening title disclaims any specific connection to the conflicts in Northern Ireland and the film itself studiously avoids referring to either Belfast or the IRA by name, it is also quite clear from the film that it is dealing with a recognisable setting and situation. Indeed, critics have, at various times, praised the film for both its distinctive Irish flavour and the enduring relevance of one of its apparent messages (the futility of violence). What the film does, in this respect, is not so much dispense with local details as deprive them of their social and political dimension. For, by employing the conventions of expressionism, and introducing an element of religious allegory, the film's interpretation of events is inevitably metaphysical rather than social. It is not history and politics which can explain the characters' motivations and actions, only an inexorable fate or destiny. In doing so, it also reinforces a view of the Northern Ireland situation as fundamentally irrational. As Tom Nairn has noted (in The Break-up of Britain), it has become quite common to account for the "troubles" in terms of what he labels "the myth of atavism." It is only "a special historical curse, a luckless and predetermined fate," he observes, "which can account for the war." And it is this viewpoint which is effectively reinforced by Odd Man Out. For Johnny too is "cursed," by virtue of his adoption of violence, and becomes, in his turn, the victim of an apparently "luckless and predetermined fate."

See also MovieNite's take on The Fallen Idol.