Odd Man Out (1947)

Odd Man Out (Carol Reed, 1947)

 "This story is told against a background of political unrest in a city of Northern Ireland. It is not concerned with the struggle between the law and an illegal organisation, but only with the conflict in the hearts of the people when they become unexpectedly involved."

 

Another film. Another fugitive. Another caveat.

 

Johnny McQueen (James Mason) is an operative of the IRA (although it has a reputation of "The Group That Must Not Be Named" in the film, referred to only as "The Organization"), newly escaped from prison and gone to ground in the flat of Kathleen Sullivan (Kathleen Ryan) and her gran'. To secure funds for their activities, Johnny has been commissioned to rob a mill payroll, and his crew are an odd lot of motley co-conspirators—Nolan (Daniel O'Herlihy, only his second film), Murphy (Roy Irving) and Pat (Cyril Cusack). Given his fugitive status, Johnny is the most at risk, but deems it necessary to lead the plan he has set up.

After the raid goes fairly successfully, the money stolen, the escape goes awry when Johnny is shot in the shoulder and, in the ensuing struggle, he shoots and kills the guard. Panicking, Pat starts to drive the getaway vehicle away, giving the wounded Johnny a last-second chance to dive through an open window and hang on while the gang speeds away. But, he can't hold on and falls and rolls into the street, leaving the others to argue about what to do. When Johnny hears sirens, he makes the decision for them, running off down an alley to take his chances, while the rest of the gang drive off.

Johnny stumbles into an abandoned air-raid shelter and passes out. He is alone, on the run, shot, bleeding out. Then, things get weird. A wayward ball from street-play bounces its way into the shelter and a little girl follows to retrieve it. But, Johnny doesn't see a little girl—he sees a copper staring mutely and the shelter his former jail-cell. He has been suffering from vertigo since his prison stay, but now, it becomes acute turning into hallucinations and fever-dreams, which he can't be sure of. Johnny's world is now an interior one and, in his predicament, he can't trust the reality of the outside-world.

He shouldn't trust it, anyway. The police are at the top of their game—a guard has been killed and the man who killed him is armed and on the run. Meanwhile, the men on the raid with him are looking out for themselves. They're either looking for Johnny or simply don't care. They're trying to save their own skins with the police on high alert. But, so are the towns-people, two of the gang get shot down in the streets after a tip-off. Johnny is found by another and deflects the attention of the coppers and allows Johnny to escape his trap.

But, anywhere he goes his shelter is only temporary...or downright dangerous. The city is one of conflicts—revolutionaries against police, faith versus politics, the samaritans versus the opportunists—and Johnny is caught up between all of them, even as he is stumbling, careening between life and death. Two women bring them into his home only to cast him out when the man of the house objects. A cab-driver finds him hiding in his hack and heaves him back into the cold. At a pub, he is hidden, but passed off to an obsessed painter (Robert Newton). Another just wants the reward. Kathleen (Kathleen Ryan), in love with Johnny, tries to find him and the local priest (W.G. Fay) just wants to save his soul.

Johnny's situation becomes more desperate and as he weakens, we see the film become more and more surrealistic, the straight lines of the night-time city streets giving way to melting interiors and perspectives that we can't trust, reflecting Johnny's failing faculties and his own sense of desperation.

Odd Man Out is disquieting and beautiful simultaneously. With a stand-out performance by James Mason—it's the film that made him a star—and a script that, for the most part, is stark and unsentimental, it would fit neatly in the noir niche, while careering into an inevitable fatalism that draws you in, slowly and inexorably, until its last dark moments of mercy, which don't feel like mercy at all, but a last resort. Reed's direction has a great deal to do with that, as he turns any space—even the city-streets—into a claustrophobic nightmare ready to suffocate at any time. Credit Robert Krasker for the cinematography making spectacle of alley-ways drenched in long shadows blasted by a single source of light and the cobblestone streets back-lit by luminous puddles that you could imagine their tread underfoot.

Odd Man Out was the first film to receive a BAFTA as "Best Film." And it is the favorite film of Gore Vidal, as well as Roman Polanski—probably as it reminded him of his experiences hiding out from the Nazi's in the Krakow ghetto during WWII, which would inform his film The Pianist.

 

Gideon of Scotland Yard

Gideon of Scotland Yard (aka Gideon's Day, John Ford, 1958) You think you know a guy. Take John Ford. I couldn't have been more surprised to see Ford listed as an executive producer (along with King Kong producer Merian C. Cooper) on that mixture of cowboys and "Kong" stop-motion/live action hybrid, Mighty Joe Young (with effects work done by King Kong magician Willis O'Brien and a young apprentice by the name of Ray Harryhausen). It featured Ben Johnson, one of Ford's stock company, so I shouldn't have been too surprised.

But, years after being escorted off Mister Roberts and making his masterpiece The Searchers, there is this curiosity that Ford produced and directed in Britain, far afield from his westerns and military dramas. Soon after making The Bridge on the River Kwai (and starring in Ford pal Howard Hawks' Land of the Pharoahs), Jack Hawkins was picked by Ford to play Scotland Yard sleuth George Gideon from John Creasey's series of novels starting with his "Gideon's Day," written in 1955.

Now, Gideon is a Detective Chief Inspector and with that goes a lot of responsibility. But, that doesn't mean that you're immune from the vagaries of life, like getting enough time in the bathroom in the morning, or parking tickets from too-earnest young bobbies, family matters like making it home in time to attend your daughter's concert—her first (she's played by Anna Massey...and it was her first...film), or acquiring the salmon for the dinner you have to have with the in-law's...if you're not held up at the office by the demands of the job.

For Gideon, on this day of days, has to deal with the possible bribery charges of one of his sergeants—and that will mean personally interviewing the informant (if he can find him), the escape of a violent sex maniac rumored to be on the road to London, not to mention a couple attempted murders, bankroll robberies by a dinner-jacketed mob...and that bobby, who pops in Gideon's Day like the proverbial bad penny.

The film is an oddity, but only because it should be more well-known, as Ford, the picture-maker is working on high-gear here...with some sterling talent in the British film industry: T. E. B. Clarke (The Lavender Hill Mob) wrote the screenplay, premier art director Ken Adam designed the look, and it was photographed by master cinematographer Freddie Young. With such talent behind the scenes, the film would at least be a curiosity, but it's directed by Jack Ford, which warrants a must-see for those who "like them the way they used to make them," or need to be convinced that Ford could do more than westerns...or work with John Wayne.

Those who know Ford's work know that there is a constant struggle for the appropriate tone: Ford, especially in his later years, was fearlessly tackling darker material—making him somewhat unpopular with his studio's—while balancing it with comedy, whether it's the popping of societal balloons or muddying stuffed shirts, or merely exposing the follies of the needlessly pretentious. Characters are in constant danger of barking "Lighten up!" both to their on-screen film-peers but also to the film at large. 

Given the material, Clarke's script provides Ford an almost seamless balancing act between familial follies and often deadly serious police work, showing the pressures of maintaining a civil head while dealing with the lowest of criminal creeps. Yes, the family stuff can be a bit frothy—Anna Lee (mentioned here two days in a row!) plays Gideon's wife, hailing as she does from the county of Kent—but contrast it with the escaped rapist, which Ford films in a way eerily similar to Hitchcock's sense of dread.

Also, unusual for Ford, is a little narrative side-track of what makes a man. Now, this was something he might not have been able to try in his American Westerns...and certainly not around his apprentice, Wayne. When a vicar of a local parish is jeered by the local children for being "a sissy," he stoically turns the other cheek, refusing to talk about his commando service in order to not glorify war, but when he is attacked by a criminal, he does what he has to do to stop the violence. Both he and Gideon are appalled by violence—one preaches against it and one tries to prevent it—they face and take action when confronted by it, but, in their separate ways, avoid resorting to it.

It's a good film, by a master film-maker, but try to see it in color—that's the more complete British version. The U.S. version is in black and white.

Oh, one other thing: at the time Ford was in London filming Gideon's Day, he had the opportunity to meet one of his biggest fans, a Japanese director named Akira Kurosawa.

The Man Who Never Was

The Man Who Never Was (Ronald Neame, 1956) I first read the story of the off-beat plan to distract the Nazis from British invasion plans in grade-school with a scholastic printing of Ewen Montagu's fascinating book. I knew there'd been a short-lived TV series with Robert Lansing in the 60's—more live-spy than the actual event—but this had nothing to do with that.  This one was a true story. It started a fascination with the morally ambiguous world of spies (in WWII and beyond) that still fills my trench-coat to this day.

But this story was true; the name of the corpse washed ashore was changed to protect the Allies on the invasion route to Sicily.  

On April 30, 1943, the body of Major William Martin of the Royal Marines was washed ashore on the beach of Huelva, Spain. Chained to the loop of his trench-coat was a briefcase containing personal documents (so they wouldn't be transferred through official channels) that hinted that the invasion, code-named Operation Husky, would land at Greece and Sardinia, and that  deceptive intelligence efforts would be made to convince the Germans that the invasion would take place attacking Sicily.

It was all a hoax.  There was no Major Martin (although his obituary did appear in The London Times), and the body was a plant by British intelligence forces to sway the Germans from the actual Husky invasion of Sicily, a strategic "must" for the invasion of first Italy, and then the Eastern pincer move on Germany. (Winston Churchill once remarked that "Everyone but a bloody fool would know that it's Sicily").  The plan, dubbed "Operation Mincemeat"—in the hope that the Germans would "swallow" it—was concocted by Flight Lt. Charles Cholmondeley* and Lt. Cmdr. Montagu. A corpse (that of a 34 year old Welshman Glyndwr Michael, who had no immediate family) was obtained, an elaborate back-history created, documents forged (including love letters and family correspondence), and dumped by submarine off the Spanish coast.

The Germans bought it...to the point where they still anticipated the attack two weeks after the Allies landed in Sicily. The film of the book by Montagu (played in the film by Clifton Webb) takes a few liberties—it romanticizes some of the incidents (for instance the authorship of the love letters) and creates a follow-up operation that ensures the information is transferred by a German agent (Stephen Boyd, in his film debut) without embellishment to the enemy, but it's an interesting dramatization ("It's the most outrageous, disgusting, preposterous, not to say barbaric idea I've ever heard, but work out full details and get back to me in the morning!") about one of the weirder operations in a war full of them. 

* Cholmondeley got the idea from a multi-schemed memo by one intelligence officer named Ian Fleming (who was inspired by a novel by Basil Thomsen), who in 1953 would create his own intelligence agent, James Bond.

Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451 (Francois Truffaut, 1966) As long as we're looking at movies with dystopian society speculations, we should look at an unusual one from the 1960's with a different "take" on things. "Fahrenheit 451" is Ray Bradbury's conjecture, inspired by past Nazi practices during its Third—and final— Reich, the then-current McCarthy era (at the time of its writing) and future projections of thought-control, of a society where the written word is banned as subversive, and "firemen," in a time when houses are fire-proof, are, instead, tasked with burning contraband books. That is, all of them.

In the society of "Fahrenheit 451" (supposed to be in the American mid-West post-1960), books are considered bad, as they offer a different perspective from the government's social engineering efforts to keep the populace passive and controlled. Books stir everything up, confuse and enervate (and inspire), so they are suppressed to keep people placid and "equal" (although some more than others).

Bradbury's book was first published as a novella "The Fireman" in the Galaxy Science Fiction magazine in early 1951 (written on a rented typewriter in UCLA's Powell Library) and expanded for Ballantine Books in 1953. It became a classroom perennial to teach students metaphorical concepts and to keep a wary eye on sponsored group-think (in a time before they all graduated to Facebook).

In 1966, French director Francois Truffaut, part of the French "New Wave," chose Bradbury's book to be the subject of his first English-language film (a language barrier that created a slight frisson with the European actors taking direction from an artist (talented, though he may be, visually) for whom English was an unfamiliar language (is that the reason the dialogue is all dubbed?). On the top of that, Truffaut's version of the future is clean, sterile, upwardly mobile, very "white" and slightly robotic, and heavily influenced by Albert Speer's monolithic, concrete city blocks. 

The film's title sequence is a nifty introduction to the concept; over tinted zoom shots of roof-tops with broadcast aerials with no title-text, the credits, instead, being narrated by actor Alex Scott. It sets you up for a world without words, and the movie-proper starts with a call to the local fire-house and a small team of fire-men raiding a book depository, finding hidden books, creating a pile of them and setting them ablaze with ruthless efficiency.

Fahrenheit 451 tells the story of Montag (played by Oskar Werner, whose role in Truffaut's Jules et Jim made him an international star), who mans the flame-thrower on the fire-man raids on hidden libraries. He is mentored by Capt. Beatty (Cyril Cusack), who coaches him on the purpose and philosophy behind their fiery task. But Montag is pulled in other directions by two women: his wife Linda (played by Julie Christie), a willing product of the government's propaganda and desirous of an easy, uncomplicated life; the other is Clarisse (also played by Christie), an optimistic and inquisitive teacher who questions the status quo, and who elicits suspicion from the government.

Clarisse's curiosity infects Montag, who begins to question what he's doing, and even smuggles away a book during one of the raids, hiding it from his wife and painstakingly teaching himself to read.

He also begins to see the other side of what he's doing. seeing the devotion of the book-keepers, one of whom (Bee Duffel) chooses to be immolated, monk-like, with her beloved books. It shakes Montag right down to his bindings and he begins to see the whole society as having a broken spine, devoid of the passion that the books engender, and he begins to feel more isolated from his co-workers and his wife. After all, he is now a criminal...in his own mind, and in theirs, as well.

Truffaut's film is flawed—his published diaries reveal that is was a difficult "shoot," especially in dealing with actors (especially his former star Werner) and he was never satisfied with the English translation of the script, preferring the French version. Perhaps that is why the film seems to come most alive when he languishes his lens on all those montaged shots of books, as they explode into flame with an almost sensual fervor. Pages crisp and blacken among the collections of controversial books—and even an issue of Cahiers du cinéma, the magazine where Truffaut began his film criticism career—with all the unblinking fervor that Carl Theodore Dreyer used filming The Passion of Joan of Arc. Truffaut mixes the titles notorious at the time of the film with familiar classics long past their time of controversy ("David Copperfield" for instance) to show the wide spectrum of time and how it can outdistance objections of long-ago melted snowflakes.

There are moments that are dodgy—technically, on the effects side, the jet-packed police are clumsily wired in front of a projected back-drop that exposes the searchers as not moving independently in flight. But, on the other hand, the movie does forecast flat-screen television monitors (interactive ones!) and the way the media can invade one's life. Such things are much less jarring in current perspective than jet-packs (however poorly supposed).

Fahrenheit 451 does have an aspect to it that makes me regard it fondly, seeing past its flaws—its ending. In it (FLAMING SPOILER ALERT), once Montag has escaped his puppeteered pursuers—and is dramatically and fraudulently "killed" for the cameras—he makes his way along an abandoned railway track to his ultimate destination—a secluded wood that has become the home of the "book-people" who each devote their lives to a single book, memorizing it, archiving it in their minds, so that it can never be destroyed except by death (and even that is maintained with a hand-me-down oral history to the next generation).

It is one of my favorite sequences in film* augmented by an exquisite strings-only score by Bernard Herrmann. As the spken words commingle, Herrmann, whose score has previously gone turgid in moments of action and pursuit, breaks free and creates a delicate melancholy theme that is one of his loveliest compositions, certainly one of the most beautiful in cinema since the sound era. That he ends it with an unresolved blast of strings that resembles a cry of anguish finishes the film with an appropriate flourish of emotion previously not realized in the film. 

It moves me no matter how many times I've experienced it. 

After a couple of decades of an update being planned, HBO has produced a new version starring Michael B. Jordan, Michael Shannon, Sofia Boutella and Keir Dullea to be directed by Rahmin Bahrani (director of Man Push Cart and Goodbye Solo) which sounds very intriguing. They'll start showing it May 19th of this year.

*

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold

Over Christmas, I had great fun reading "A Legacy of Spies," the new novel by John le Carre. In it, the events of le Carre's earlier book "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold" come back to haunt the British Secret Service—The Circus, as le Carre dubbed it—as those who are still living are sued by living relatives for damages incurred by the events of the story. Is it some Russian plot? No. It is mere gold-digging. The plaintiffs are blackmailing the Service to reveal what they know...or suspect...if they are not payed handsomely. It is always fun for me to read le Carre but the nostalgia factor of coming back to the old characters, even if in passing, was a bit of a thrill. And whenever Alec Leamas was mentioned in the book, I still had trouble imagining Richard Burton's face and manner. I wrote this in 2011, some time before Tomas Alfredson's excellent version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy reached theaters—I should post my review of that here when I'm done with the clutch of Holiday released movies.

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (Martin Ritt, 1965) With the anticipation of the Christmas release of a film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, it would do well to revisit the world of George Smiley, "Control," and the duplicity of agent-turned-novelist John le Carré's "kitchen-sink" version of spies. Although Smiley and the others would loom large in his later novels (especially the "Karla Trilogy"), they're mere background characters in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, the focus of the tale being operative Alec Leamas (Richard Burton), former head of the West Berlin branch of "The Circus," who must go behind enemy lines—in fact, one of the toughest of them, the Berlin Wall—as a potential "mole"* to ferret out who, among their Cold War equivalency on the other side, might be a double agent for the Soviets, the one who is responsible for the death of one of Leamas' contacts. To "Control" (Cyrilm Cusack), the head of "The Circus"  it is a rare opportunity to do some damage control and, possibly, if they can take advantage of an agency power-struggle, some harm. 

His identity is kept the same—The Circus wants Leamas and his background history out in the open—but he is demoted in rank and stature, and, depressed and drinking heavily, he becomes bait for Soviet recruitment to betray information. That's the mission, become a decoy on the "inside," another "double" feeding the Soviets false information, while trying to find out if there's a player on the other side in The Circus feeding information to the Russians.** 

Oh, what a tangled web the Cold War weaves.

Taken to East Berlin, Leamas is interrogated by a suspicious Russian administrator named Fiedler (Oskar Werner) who (rightly) suspects Leamas of being a "plant." Fiedler suspects a British "mole" already underground in the Soviet service and so sweats Leamas for any information to discover who that might be. Ultimately, Leamas is undone by what so many of le Carré's heroes or anti-heroes are susceptible to, the warmth of human contact—a failing that trips up a lot of the author's protagonists. Leamas "comes out of the cold," the world of spies, and his friends, relations or lovers—the thread of decency and honesty they provide—are used against him.

For the fact of the matter is the Spymasters of "The Circus" are cold-hearted bastards ("without sympathy" as "Control," played by Cyril Cusack, ponders)—they have to be to combat their enemies—and they're just as capable of betraying their own as those they fight.  

Case in point: George Smiley (played here by Rupert Davies). He would become le Carré's most celebrated character, but here he's a bit of a functionary, and he's just as cold-hearted as the rest. In the "Tinker, Tailor..." timeline, "Control" was long since dead, having been driven out by "the new broom" from his station, which had left him suspicious and paranoid (ultimately with good reason) with Smiley his only trusted colleague. 

When the BBC made a television mini-series of "Tinker...", Smiley was famously played by Sir Alec Guinness and (as le Carré amusingly notes in his new forward to "Tinker, Tailor...,") because of that he "lost control" of the character. But Smiley (however sympathetically Guinness played him) is also a "cold-hearted bastard"—if he wasn't, he wouldn't have lost the vital clue that was exploited by his enemies. He gives as bad as he gets, and, even at his most triumphant, takes little joy in what he does.

Davies as George Smiley in The Spy...

In such a world, Ritt's direction is entirely appropriate—low-key, almost documentary in feel on the streets of London—in drab black-and-white, not the high-contrast color of other spy films of the era. There is nothing glamorous about it, and the circumstances play out slowly and subtly—in fact, after a debriefing by his boss, the shift in tone is so dreary one suspects one is watching a different film. It is part and parcel of the subterfuge—it works on us as it does for Leamas' Sov' recruiters (most prominently Michael Hordern).

And the script—now there's an interesting tale. A beginning draft was written by Hollywood veteran Guy Trosper, who died subsequently. Taking over was poet-playwright Paul Dehn. Dehn had written the final polish on the James Bond spy film Goldfinger (amusingly, as the two films could not be more polar opposite), and was the mainstay-writer for the "Planet of the Apes" sequels. But, Dehn knew the world of spies well—during the second World War, Major Paul Dehn was the "Political Warfare" officer at the BSC training headquarters "Camp X" (where among the trainees were Roald Dahl and Bond creator Ian Fleming). *** Dehn was well-versed in spy-craft, deceit, and keeping secrets and his distillation of le Carré's novel brings the moral duplicity to the fore, while keeping the audience guessing on whose side is whom.

If the film has one flaw, it is the casting of Burton as Leamas. Burton was too good, too charismatic an actor/star to play a functionary like Leamas (it's about the same as "buying" Sean Connery as a spy (which was part of the joke of the Bond series)—he's someone you'd notice walking into a room, and thus, hardly spy material. But, Burton's presence, no doubt, got the film made, so the point is a bit moot. Still, if its ideas and mysteries of the State and the heart you want more than action and fireballs (shall we say if you want to be "stirred and not shaken?"), The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is a fine, bracing tonic.

Smiley's before they were emoji's: Alec Guinness and Gary Oldman

* The term "mole" is a le Carré invention—his spy-circles code-name for a double agent hiding in plain sight within one of the other spy agencies, Soviet or British, and relaying information to "the other side."

** There has been a rich history of double agents throughout the annals of spy-dom, the most significant of which were "The Cambridge Five"—Kim Philby, Donald Duart Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and a fifth (and possibly more)—who'd been recruited during their college years, passed information to the Russians during WWII, and subsequently during the post-War years through the early 1950's. "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" (and the other two of the le Carré "Karla" novels) and le Carré's subsequent "A Perfect Spy" are inspired by "The Five" and their Russian puppet-master.

*** And, interestingly, one of the people who asked, and was briefly considered, to run Camp X...was Kim Philby!

The Rising of the Moon

The Rising of the Moon (John Ford, 1957) Interesting, charming anthology film from Ford, featuring three short stories (of approximately thirty minutes each) from the Emerald Isle.

Ford was able to parlay his success with The Quiet Man—made on a shoe-string (and with a Western in the bargain for Republic Pictures) and reaping a pot of gold—to make this labor of love to promote the Irish film industry, with a cast of actors from the country's Abbey Theater (which figures prominently in the film's third sequence). As a carrot for American audiences, Ford uses Tyrone Power as a presenter for each of the stories, each different in tone and style, but bearing Ford's ability to bring out the best in his cast, while also keeping a reign on several threads of character arc interlacing throughout each tale, to make a verdant pattern full of blarney. Each one also has a distinct style of shooting, one landscaped, one close-quartered, one urban and chiaroscuro, that slyly reflect themes and moods of the story, even if the whimsy is a constant factor.

The three stories are thus: 

"The Majesty of the Law"—A police inspector (Cyril Cusack) ventures to the country-side, wind-blasted and rough-hewn to arrest a man for assault.  He attracts the interest of some locals, briefly toys with a rapscallion (Jack McGowran) who is trying to avoid him, then visits an old friend to shoot the breeze. Things are not what they seem, and the segment ends on a complicated note.

"A Minute's Wait"—A busy, typical day at Dunfail station.  A brief stop-over opens the bar and the train empties of passengers. Then things get complicated involving a match-making minister, a honeymooning British couple, young lovers, a goat, and a ghost story-in-passing. Just when things get resolved, more complications ensue, and the train is delayed another "minute's wait." The train empties again...and again...and again, as places change, stories get crossed, and get schedules get thrown out the window, while everyone gets increasingly drunk. Man schedules, God laughs, and life gets in the way...and nothing is stationary.

"1921"—The entire world seems to be a little off-kilter and threatening to fall into the abyss in this story set during the Black and Tan Wars, and the height of the British/Irish conflict. Sean Curran (Donal Donnelly) is set to be hung for treason. A snaking queue of townspeople parades in protest in front of the prison as the scaffold is prepared ("That step is loose. Fix it or he'll break his neck before he falls" says the Irish prison functionary in a display of gallows humor) Curran is set to hang and the Brit overseers are feeling the pressure keeping the lid on a situation that could quickly get out of hand.  A visitation by nuns, one of them Curran's sister inflames events and the intrigue moves to the streets as the Army presence builds up and loyalties are tested. "There's a little treason in all of us," says a local bobby working for the Brits, summing up the situation and the tale.

It's great story-telling all the way through, with nothing familiar in the Ford crowd-pleasing arsenal: no John Wayne hook, no western fallback, no Ford stock company dependence, just the Old Master weaving his magic, with an artist's eye and a director's sense of pace, detail, and theatricality, each episode given its own look and feel, everything fresh, but rooted in the man's  presentation and gifts, unfamiliar, yet unmistakably Ford country.

Psycho is not my favorite Hitchcock film, but I revere it as a display of the director at the top of his story-telling gifts and mastery of the form. In the same way, The Rising of the Moon shows Ford's abilities to play with the arts of tale and film, and is the purest example of the director's gifts..and his craft.