“Oliver!” (1968)
Despite the acclaim, including a Best Director Oscar and the Best Picture statue too, it’s easy to regard “Oliver!” as a late-career anomaly from Reed — his only ever attempt at the musical genre, it’s also the last real spark in a four-decade-spanning career, with both his subsequent films, “Flap” and theMia Farrow/Topol oddity “Follow Me” being disappointments, to put it mildly. But look closer and in addition to becoming a Christmas TV staple, “Oliver!” despite its surface dissimilarities (it was based on the stage musical by Lionel Bart) is something of a sublimation of all of Reed’s directorial instincts — good and bad — to that point. Here the expressive mise en scène that he was so noted for earlier, returns in glorious technicolor that for once enhances rather than diminishes the glory of his compositions (props due here too to DP Oswald Morris). And the focus is children, who have always figured in Reed’s films, often working class kids in gangs at that. Here the sentimentality that Reed could be prone to when given lesser material is offset by the squalor of the Dickensian slum setting (albeit studio-bound) which gives a socially conscious cast to the story that is redolent of “The Stars Look Down,” and other earlier Reed films. And the massive scale of the set builds enabled Reed to achieve some truly spectacular and intricate musical numbers, especially “Consider Yourself” and to pepper the film with his signature expressionist camerawork: just watch the introduction of his nephew Oliver Reed as Bill Sykes — it’s a cobblestone/archway/looming shadow combination straight out of “The Third Man.” But perhaps what makes “Oliver!” most worthy of reevaluation as an integral title in Reed’s thematic and stylistic catalogue, is how, despite the huge ensemble and complex choreography, the filmmaking never gets in the way of the story and the characters — in a way his personal investment can be felt in how he chooses to serve the material rather than any real agenda of his own. It’s paradoxical and not entirely true that the greatest mark of Reed as an auteur is that he left no recognizable directorial mark on his best films (as though a great director must leave a killer’s calling card in every scene), but “Oliver!” makes a good case that his was a talent that was probably more flexible, subtle and oddly humble than he is really given credit for.
Outside of these six features, Reed’s filmography becomes shakier, but there are some valuable titles that are less well-known amongst the disappointments too. Prior to his breakout with 1940’s “Night Train to Munich,” Reed had worked mainly in “quota quickies,” that is cheaply made b-movies created solely to fulfill the quota of British films that British cinema’s were mandated to show by the 1927 Cinematograph Act. However his first solo directorial credit, for “Midshipman Easy“(1935) which he himself chalked up to being at best a learning process, brought him some notice, most tellingly from one Graham Greene, then reviewing films for The Spectator. Greene admired both it and his next film, the comedy “Laburnam Grove” and would of course go on to work with Reed a decade later, establishing a partnership that would give rise to three of Reed’s best films.
READ MORE: Top 15 Classic Noir Films
“The Way Ahead” (1944) is an authentic and heartfelt grunt’s-eye look at life in a WWII infantry division from conscription through training to actual combat. Expanded from a propaganda short film he made, it stars David Niven, who is a sight more convincing as the officer he becomes than as the petrol pump attendant he starts out as. In fact the casting of ineffably posh types as working class was a problem elsewhere in Reed’s oeuvre, notably in the sappy “A Kid for Two Farthings,” though Michael Redgrave fared better as the coalminer’s son who goes to college in “The Stars Look Down.” And though that film’s awkward melding of defanged politics and romantic melodrama, and an eye-wateringly patronizing opening voiceover about the “noble, simple, ordinary hero,” doesn’t quite work otherwise, the on-location shooting and casting of the colliery sections, and the whole third act which deals with a mine collapse, are exceptional. The end of the war saw him pick up his first Oscar (he’d own again for “Oliver!“) for the documentary “The True Glory” which details the end of the war on the Western front and which led straight into his peerless late-40s run. Reed left the set of “Mutiny on the Bounty” (1962) reportedly unable to cope with star Marlon Brando, and was replaced by Lewis Milestone, but would go on to attempt a different sort of epic with the Michelangelo yarn “The Agony and the Ecstasy” which was a disastrous flop at the time, and which, if anything, the passing years has rendered even more turgid and baffling in its casting of Charlton Heston — Charlton Heston! — as the Florentine Renaissance artist.
It’s tempting to stack his misses up against his hits and come to the conclusion that Reed was indeed reliant on a symphonic arrangement of collaborators and material in order for his own highest talents to be unleashed — the rest of the time he was merely, again, solid. And yet if you look at the heights he achieved during that moment of symphonic resonance, no matter how brief, Reed’s place in film history is assured: he may not have turned in as many classics as some of his contemporaries, but those he did are as great, if not greater than the ones those more household names achieved.