ODD MAN OUT, Carol Reed (1947) / Wounded and hounded on Belfast's streets

Taking place largely over the course of one tense night, set in an unnamed Belfast, a revolutionary ex-con (James Mason) leads a robbery that goes horribly wrong. Injured and hunted by the police, he seeks refuge throughout the city, while the woman he loves (Kathleen Ryan) searches for him among the shadows. Images of stunning depth characterize this fierce, spiritual depiction of a man’s ultimate confrontation with himself.

Directed and produced by Carol Reed
Written by R.C. Sherriff
Based on the novel by P.F. Green
Cinematography: Robert Krasker
Edited by Fergus McDonell
Music composed by William Alwyn
Release date: 31 January 1947
Running time: 1h 56m, b&w

HOW THIS WORKS
To find out where to rent or stream Odd Man Out online, visit JustWatch.com. Watch it on your own during the week and then join us for our Zoom conversation Saturday, August 2. A Zoom link will appear on the right of your screen once you RSVP. (NOTE: If you can’t get that link to work, copy and paste it into the search bar of your browser.) First-timers must sign up no later than Friday 8/1 in order to ensure being admitted.

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One good Carol Reed masterpiece deserves another. The great British auteur registered at least two certifiable ones during his career, and having enjoyed his more vaunted The Third Man several months ago, we feel it's time to embrace Odd Man Out as well. It's no less deserving, and the connections are numerous. Reed revels in the chiaroscuro he finds in Vienna and here in Belfast, the cities serving as his ready-made sets. Bravura camerawork gives both films a kinetic quality distinct from their tracking of movement. Suspense envelops the events of both as a glove covers a hand. It would be a stretch to describe Reed as overlooked; his work with novelist Graham Greene and his 1968 Oscar for Oliver attest to that. Still, he may not be given his due as a director of the first rank – at least, not on this side of the pond.

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TRAILER, RATINGS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsLLfuNOvws

Rotten Tomatoes: 100% rating of 32 reviews
Metacritic: 87 rating based on 18 reviews (universal acclaim), "Must See"

BLURBS & ATTITUDES
Reed's take on the material is innovative, letting realism blur into an anaemic, soul-searching delirium. ∞ BBC

Carol Reed's 15th feature was his first entirely personal project and the contrast with anything that had gone before immediately struck contemporary critics and audiences, who were somewhat taken aback by the fact that he had chosen to produce such an anti-heroic story about a divided part of the triumphant nation so soon after the Second World War. Belfast is never identified by name and Johnny McQueen's political allegiance is downplayed as much as possible. But few were in any doubt that Reed had made a sympathetic (not to say quasi-religious) character out of an IRA gunman, while demonising his neighbours on either side of the sectarian divide. ∞ David Parkinson, Empire

"From there, Odd Man Out, with its allusions to the post-war initiative of the Irish Republican Army, proceeds to transpire over the course of a single evening as Johnny, bloody and dying, decamps to various urban enclaves while his men divorce themselves from the robbery and Kathleen attempts to reconvene with her lover as the police question her association with the group. What results is a knotty drama of strained allegiances, interpersonal imperatives, and spiritual recompense, visualized as a nocturnal trip through the recesses of one man’s troubled psyche.
"Reed, whose primary talent lied less in his ability to articulate a particular worldview than it did in sagely enlisting skilled collaborators, established with Odd Man Out a synergetic working method which would bring about a string of his most popular successes at the close of the 1940s. Based on a book by F.L. Green and co-written by playwright and novelist R.C. Sherriff, Odd Man Out fully evinced Reed’s growing proclivity for the world of literature, perhaps accounting for the humane ethos and nuanced character relations of both this film and his two subsequent projects, The Fallen Idol and The Third Man, each with screenplays by Graham Greene (the director’s later films would feature source material by, among others, Joseph Conrad, Max Catto, and Jan de Hartog).
"Just as important is the employment of cinematographer Robert Krasker, whose evocative, expressionistic lighting and starkly variegated black-and-white palette simultaneously anticipated the noir stylings of The Third Man, his most celebrated collaboration with Reed, and ably actualized the inner turmoil of the film’s antiheroes. As the narrative unfolds and Johnny continues to lose considerable amounts of blood, slipping at times in an out of consciousness, so, too, do Reed and Krasker’s compositions grow more abstract and densely orchestrated, with superimpositions and elemental visual effects crowding the frame while heightening the film’s sense of spiraling fate. ∞ Jordan Cronk, Slant

Dostoevskian in conception and design, the story progressively becomes more wildly adventurous, more mystical, more half-baked. But even in its failures, Odd Man Out is admirable. It is a reckless, head-on attempt at greatness, and the attempt frequently succeeds. ∞ TIME