“Carol could put a film together like a watchmaker puts together a watch,” stated director Michael Powell, himself not exactly notorious for his slapdash approach to filmmaking, speaking of fellow Brit Carol Reed. Though undoubtedly a statement of admiration, this quote also points to the still-standing difficulty in assessing Reed’s work in totality: while he may have turned in three more-or-less unassailable classics, one of which, “Odd Man Out” came out on Criterion Blu Ray yesterday, there’s a sense today that Reed has not got enough of a personal authorial imprint across his entire output to earn him a real spot in the auteur pantheon. In fact, his name is often unfamiliar even to those who count one or more of his films among their favorites — compare that relative retrospective anonymity with the reputations of contemporaries like Hitchcock or Wilder or Ford.
Partly this probably comes down to the fact that Reed himself, by all accounts, was an unassuming man, the polar opposite of the bullhorn-toting blowhard caricature of a movie director. But there is also a chameleonic quality to his output, a willingness to subdue his own stylistic impulses in service of stories that sometimes did not deserve this deferential treatment, which makes his legacy, outside of the aforementioned triptych, hard to pin down. And so it’s easier to in some ways consign him to the box marked “solid, technically competent” — watchmaker, if you will. The problem then becomes, how do you account for “The Third Man“?
For many people, the answer was to erroneously and unfairly credit that film’s greatness to star Orson Welles, who himself having gently encouraged the misapprehension early on perhaps, later felt compelled to state firmly “it was Carol’s film.” Inasmuch as anything about the wonderful “The Third Man” can be said to be unfortunate, it’s almost unfortunate that Welles’ stunning turn in the film gave any sort of credence to that rumor, because simply put, “The Third Man” is enough film to build a profile and a legacy upon all by itself.
But it’s not all by itself. To celebrate the Blu Ray release of “Odd Man Out,” one of the other great films of Reed’s, we thought we’d give ourselves the pleasure of looking through his filmography again and pulling out the six titles that represent the best and most pivotal entries in an under sung and overall undervalued body of work.
“Night Train To Munich” (1940)
Reed’s name is not half so famous as that of Hitchcock these days, so it’s probably appropriate that this more or less overt take on Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes” is roughly half as famous as its forebear. Casting “The Lady Vanishes” star Margaret Lockwood, using a script by that film’s writers (Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, who worked with Reed several times) and even including the same popular bumbling Englishmen, Charters and Caldicott (Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, proving that Shared Universes are not a Marvel Comics invention) the film feels creakier than the polished gleam of Reed’s best work. But for a wartime-era spy adventure made when the war had scarcely begun, it’s still remarkably solid. Perhaps best of all it’s a showcase for a tremendously likable performance from a laconic but dashing Rex Harrison who gets to have quite a bit of fun here as a low-rent boardwalk crooner who is also a high-ranking British spy who impersonates a Nazi officer and dangles off a cable car in order to save the day and win the girl. But while it’s somewhat prescient in its subplot about concentration camps, it’s a film that history has overtaken, and though we can hardly blame Reed or his writers for not anticipating the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust, somehow the lighthearted, romantic romp tone strikes a sour, or at best rather irrelevant note now. At the time, however, it was precisely the sort of escapist yet propagandist film that a nation newly at war could embrace, and it was a success for Reed, one that broke him out of B-pictures and second-string status, and set the stage for him to go on to his greatest successes in the 1940s.
“Odd Man Out” (1947)
A hunted man is pursued through the darkening streets of a crumbling, divided city by police, friends, co-conspirators, enemies and his blindly faithful lover — yes, there are many ways in which Reed’s 1947 classic, foreshadows his defining masterpiece of two years later, not least in his use of chiaroscuro compositions and literal foreshadowing. But “Odd Man Out” is the more serious film, it doesn’t have the cock-eyed black humor of “The Third Man” and its expressionist cinematography, as much Murnau as it is noir-influenced or Wellesian, is perhaps even more evocative and extreme. Occasionally, the bold use of mise en scène, stark lighting cues and woozy editing techniques — as when the portraits in Robert Newton‘s mad artist’s studio line up to become an audience, or the double exposures designed to take us into McQueen’s (James Mason) dying, flickering mind — land a little on the nose, but they do so with such simple impact that the effect is breathtaking anyway. Yet “Odd Man Out,” often cited by Roman Polanski as his favorite film of all time, is most remarkable not for the theatricality of its expressionist stylings, but for how brilliantly they sit alongside Reed’s social realist concerns, here in an almost documentary-like attention to authentic detail. A lot of that is derived from the location shooting, with the exteriors largely filmed on the ground in West Belfast, but playwright RC Sheriff‘s script also deserves great praise here. Humanizing moments of dialogue, like the kindly ladies who take McQueen in and then bicker about whether cutting his coat sleeve to tend to his wound is the right thing to do, sit alongside Reed’s own magpie eye for visual detail, like the little girl who only ever wears one roller skate, or the way the botched robbery and shooting that leads to McQueen’s predicament becomes instantly legendary as a game replayed by neighborhood kids before a single day has passed. Managing to be oddly apolitical, despite McQueen’s leadership of an IRA-type organization, it’s remarkable how much of a debt Yann Demange‘s excellent recent “’71” also owes “Odd Man Out.” An elegiac portrait of a broken, bleeding idealist’s odyssey through enemy territory, “Odd Man Out” was Reed’s first masterpiece, and, had not “The Third Man” come along a couple of years later, might well have been regarded as the pinnacle of his achievements. As it is, it’s merely a pinnacle.