British director Carol Reed turned out three masterpieces in the late 1940s. With an exemplary performance from Ralph Richardson, The Fallen Idol (1948) does justice to Graham Greene’s brilliant story “The Basement Room.” The Third Man (1949), the most celebrated of the three, has its unforgettable zither theme, its evocation of postwar Vienna, and its extraordinary script, including the speech Orson Welles improvised at the Prater amusement park. Fierce competition, but my vote for Reed’s best goes to Odd Man Out (1947), a modern passion play about a doomed man in the shadows and alleys of his last hours alive.
Odd Man Out foregrounds political and religious themes and differs thereby from most film noirs. Yet I wouldn’t hesitate to claim it for the category. The setting is Belfast, Northern Ireland, where the people take their Catholicism seriously, and the robbery that triggers the plot is committed not by your typical thieves but by an unnamed underground movement, presumably the IRA. Thanks to the inspired cinematography—the hero’s haunted profile, the desolate cityscape, the long narrow alleys—the Belfast we see is a dark and bleak war zone.
You may argue that the revolutionary cause is undermined in Odd Man Out, which establishes that the men who rob a mill for a cause are no nobler than those who rob banks for money. Nevertheless, the viewer’s sympathy is with rebel leader Johnny McQueen (James Mason), whom the children in the street emulate in their pretend games of cops and robbers. “It’s probably the best thing that Mason has ever done, and certainly the best film he’s ever been in,” actor Richard Burton observed.
from The American Scholar (July 9, 2020). For the rest of the article, click here.