Left Field Cinema

Carol Reed was a London born film director who found international and continued fame through the creation of his priceless and highly revered 1949 feature film The Third Man, a classic in every sense of the word. Voted the best British film by the BFI, its third act guest appearance from Orson Welles gives it a sense of American class often considered lacking from British film of the same era.

Unfortunately given the dizzy heights which The Third Man reached, a considerable shadow was cast over an arguably superior work Reed completed in 1947 – Odd Man Out, a hidden classic.

The story follows Johnny McQueen played by James Mason, the leader of a Belfast based “organisation” who has recently been released from prison. McQueen is planning a bank robbery amidst serious doubts about his health and ability to execute the heist correctly. Despite the reservations of his men the robbery proceeds. Inevitably it goes wrong, McQueen takes a bullet in the shoulder and kills a man, during their escape McQueen is separated from the others – delirious and wounded he falls into a back alley to recover, as the remaining gang members, and McQueen’s lover Kathleen attempt to find him in a city besieged by police who are looking for all of them.

What sounds like the making of political film about the British presence in Northern Ireland never gets close to tackling the thorny subject matter head on but instead delves surprisingly into more philosophical issues of life, death, faith, and justice. Odd Man Out has an incredible amount of depth as seen though Reeds unashamedly stylised imagery. Reed’s famous and heavy use of his trademark Dutch tilt is here present and correct, but his style goes far beyond this one distinct technique. A seamless transition from reality to hallucination and back again for example as McQueen imagines he’s back in his prison cell and not dying in some back street, his imagined guard is actually a confused little girl retrieving a lost football who has stumbled onto our criminal hero and is too young to possibly understand what she has discovered. Later as night falls on the city Reed makes the best of shadows and light, McQueen’s men run through back alley’s and between yards, avoiding the police and searching for their comrade, they are often completely silhouetted and brilliantly contrasting in this dingy world of street lamps and cobbled roads. These sequences are visually stark and expertly constructed to create a world of dark and light where anything can be hiding behind the next corner. This visceral creation is supported by Reeds use of dank and often very dingy sets and locations often rain soaked for a completely grotty and by 1940’s standards, gritty feeling of urban decay. It is a ruthless world, where women send men to their deaths, and children pretend to be gangsters in the street (an image HBO series The Wire would use later in relation to their anti-hero gay gangster Omar).

The story is in a sense an odyssey, plot wise the film rarely veers into anything more complex than has been presented in its set-up. A dying man wonders aimlessly, disoriented and confused, as he does so he stumbles into numerous situations and locations, as do the members of the gang, his lover, and the police. With McQueen’s journey and those of his pursuers Reed paints a vivid picture of a city and a world through a series of scenes and set pieces. There are some truly inspired moments throughout, the bank robbery is a good example of a reverse cliché as the thieves insist that the patrons and staff keep their hands down so not to draw attention to them, they don’t bark orders or announce “this is a robbery!” No, nothing so common place, instead they simply walk into the bank, take the money and walk out. Later two of McQueen’s gang take shelter from the authorities with a elderly woman who instantly recognises from the weight of their coats that the two men are packing firearms, and gives them back to them informing them that they might need their weapons later.

There are also well written scenes of luck, both good and bad, a intense fight on a overloaded tram car being one example of the bad. Later, McQueen takes refuge in a horse carriage, the rider sneaks McQueen through a road block unaware that he even has a passenger, the police officer asks him who’s in the car, and he sarcastically answers “Johnny McQueen!” The officer is amused and lets the driver and his anonymous passenger through the road block. Both McQueen and the driver are completely unaware of their luck as both have only escaped jail through chance.

There is a real sense of community built up in Odd Man Out, the old and the young, the criminal and the authorities. A more potent scene later in the film shows a police man and a priest discussing their mutual interest in McQueen, a man barely know, the priest is interested in his soul, and concerns himself in matters of Good and Evil, can he be saved in spite of the crime he’s committed. The police man is interested by contrast less in Good and Evil and more in terms of Innocence and Guilt, the discussion parcels the notion that both sets of values are mutually exclusive concepts, Guilt having nothing to do with Evil, and equally Innocence having nothing to do with Good. They both police their community, one in a legal sense, the other in a religious sense. The community itself supports the criminal element, and then often cruelly betrays it; a scene involving a grandmother hiding a revolver from the police through surreptitious glances with Kathleen is an example of a cross generation and reluctant endorsement of the thieves and their activities. Later the priest and a local beggar discuss the situation through coded metaphor a discussion as natural as any other and the result is the beggars plot to exploit McQueen by selling his location to the priest.

Later the contrasts are expanded on as McQueen stumbles into the more affluent side of the city as the rich dance the night away and complain about the trivial side of life. Such is their existence that is seems to bare little relation to the poor area where the story began; there is a sense of an entire city as established at the start of the film with a long aerial shot which provides visually the setting the entirety of the film.

Odd Man Out takes a bizarre turn in its last act as McQueen slips deeper and deeper into delirium the beggar attempts to exploit him but ends up bringing McQueen to the home of an eccentric artist continually half drunk and a former medical student who never completed his training. There both men fight for McQueen’s life in different ways the artist wants to paint McQueen and therefore immortalise him. He is fascinated by McQueen’s dying eyes and hallucinatory ramblings. The out of work doctor attempts to mend McQueen as best he can. It’s a sort of battle between the two perspectives, but the artist’s vision is one of a pessimist he sees meaning in his unconsenting model’s eyes, he sees the truth of all humanity – “He’s doomed”. The doctor refuses to see it this way, even though he knows if he’s successful in saving McQueen from death the police will only take him for trial and execution anyway.

This sequence leads to the films climax in the snow covered night as time runs out for the various characters; here Reed keeps his most magnificent emotional punch for the closing moments of the film as he presents beauty in the bleakest of worlds. Religion fails, justice fails, art fails, medicine fails but Love transcends life in an eternal embrace.

M.Dawson