UK drama
1947
bw 116 min.
Director: Carol Reed
CLV: $49.95 - available
1 disc, catalog # CC1432L
After escaping from prison and lying low for months in a cramped row-house, the
chief of Northern Island's revolutionary Organization, Johnny McQueen (James
Mason), has plotted a payroll robbery. Speaking softly and rapidly, gently
sliding open a window to air out the tiny upstairs room, he exerts charismatic
control over his fellow rebels. When the hothead driver (Cyril Cusack) brandishes
a weapon, Johnny urges them all to go easy with their guns, and the queasiness in
his voice unsettles the Organization's second-in-command, Dennis (Robert Beatty).
Neither Dennis nor Kathleen (Kathleen Ryan), Johnny's host and not-so-secret
admirer, can persuade him to stay safely in the hideout and let Dennis carry the
load. As soon as Johnny swings into the passenger's seat, something goes wrong in
his head. The street rises and falls before him-it seems to track into his
brain-and the buildings tower over him with vertiginous force. The sunlight
confuses and dizzies him as he approaches their target; after the job, he again
grows faint and hesitates. A chaotic exchange of shots leaves a company man dead
and Johnny too seriously wounded to hang on to the speeding getaway car.
At a
point where most movies would climax, Odd Man Out begins. This story of police
pursuit concentrates on the souls of the fugitive and the men and women who
briefly harbor him; it makes Johnny's search for salvation the source of
gut-clenching suspense. It climbs to peak intensity not during shootouts or close
calls, but when Johnny-unable to locate anyone who can or will heal or succor
him-rouses himself from delirium to proclaim (from Corinthians), "Though I speak
with the tongues of men and angels and have not Charity, I am become a sounding
brass or a tinkling cymbal." This 1946 production is one of the screen's
resounding tragedies, yet the hero's downfall is caused by tragic virtue.
Johnny's pangs and twinges during the heist aren't merely physical or
psychological; they bespeak his troubled conscience about terrorism. Afterwards,
with his own life hanging by a frayed strand, his main concern is whether he
killed a man. When he discovers that he did, his moral wound is as debilitating
as his mortal one. What makes the movie almost unbearably heartrending is that
Johnny, as he's dying, is stumbling toward transcendence-and the only people
willing to help him achieve it are Kathleen and Father Tom (W. G. Fay), who can't
hook up with him, and a bird-dealer/street hustler, Shell (F. J. McCormick),
who's weak and addled. Working from a script by F. L. Green and R. C. Sherriff
(from Green's 1945 novel), the producer-director, Carol Reed, creates a world
that's a fragmented and fragmenting place where the soul cracks and flies apart.
While Odd Man Out is the most compassionate of movies, it's a poetic summary of
twentieth century harshness-of what can be called the inhuman condition.
To
quibblers, the supposedly overblown, parable elements of the script seriously mar
Reed's accomplishment-particularly the characters of Shell's housemates, Tober
(Elwyn Brook Jones), a failed med student, and Lukey (Robert Newton), a
frustrated painter, who argue over whether it's nobler to save Johnny's body in a
hospital or preserve his soul on canvas. Lukey is hyperbolic, and at their worst,
his scenes delay the action to debate philosophical points. But anyone who
responds to the film intuitively can tell that Reed aims to surpass naturalism
from frame one. Even before sudden, dislocating visual shifts reflect the Chief's
jarred perspective en route to the robbery, the subtle cut to an overhead shot of
Johnny climbing into the auto suggests the universe is weighing down on him. Even
before that-during Johnny's instruction to the boys-Reed insinuates details that
stick in the mind like the opening lines in a fairy tale. Johnny says that it
will snow later, and, of course, it does; by then, he's wavering through the
eddying flakes like an invisible man. The people Johnny meets in flight are both
real and unreal, boldly drawn and sometime mythic yet never merely "innocent" or
"evil." They include a couple of decent middle-class women (Fay Compton, Beryl
Measor) who know First Aid and are capable only of giving him that, and a
tippling coachman (Joseph Tomelty) who inadvertently takes him through a police
cordon and then drops him in limbo. They're not-so-good-Samaritans, and not so
bad, either. The Head Constable (Denis O'Dea) is an unyielding enforcer of the
law who nevertheless wants to protect Kathleen-and Father Tom is able to see her
love for Johnny as redemptive though it leads her into sin.
Cinematographer
Robert Krasker fills his nightscapes with wraith-like shadows and dazzling
illuminations. He achieves amazing depth of field without the sharp, clean
contours we associate with depth of focus; draping Reed's people in mists or
spotting them in streetlights and headlamps, outlining them in doorways or
profiling them against window shades, Krasker conjures an atmosphere that a
viewer's eyes sift excitedly. Through it all, James Mason crawls and crumples his
way to immortality. He manages to give a passionate performance as a man who must
measure the rest of his life out in heartbeats. His famous baritone voice reduced
to a plangent whisper, he acts with the angles of his face and the gleam of his
eyes. Under Reed's loving lens, he turns a passive character into a quester.
In
his novel, Green depicts the revolutionaries as twisted, pitiable creatures. The
quality of Reed's mercy is not strained. He sees rebels, lawmen, and the men and
women whose sympathies are numbed or torn as wanderers in the night. Odd Man Out
puts astonishing film craft at the service of a unique humane vision. We may
never see its like again.
-Michael Sragow
Michael Sragow is the film critic for
Seattle Weekly and a contributor to The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly. He
edited Produced and Abandoned: The Best Films You Have Never Seen (Mercury House,
1990).
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