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.

 

Brighton Rock (1948)

Brighton Rock (John Boulting, 1948) Brighton is a seaside resort town on England's southern coast, a holiday spot for the working class, and the subject of Graham Greene's "Brighton Rock," a story of the dark side that can infest a tourist attraction, where money can be loosened in many ways and in great amounts, which would attract the criminal element in the same amounts that they attract the punters.

When a film was made of Graham Greene's novel, the resort was, understandably, nervous, preventing the film-makers from shooting at the local racetracks, and to use hidden cameras during the crowd scenes on location. Oh. And there was enough of a nervousness that a calming opening card is used:

"Brighton today is a large, jolly, friendly seaside town in Sussex, exactly one hour's journey from London. But in the years between the two wars, behind the Regency terraces and crowded beaches, there was another Brighton of dark alleyways and festering slums. From here, the poison of crime and violence and gang warfare began to spread, until the challenge was taken up by the Police. This is a story of that other Brighton - now happily no more."

Quite happily. The film takes place in 1935—Greene had written a previous book "A Gun For Sale" and the events of that one are a bit of prologue for Brighton Rock, involving the death of the gangster Kite after a newspaper article has exposed the corruption involving slots and race-tracks and the resulting turf wars that have blighted Brighton. Kite's gang is now run by by a 17 year old tough and psychopath named "Pinkie" Brown (played by a 24 year old Richard Attenborough, with the deadest eyes in the world). And the film begins with a bit of news about a contest with lots of potential winners. They never gave any thought to anybody losing.

The Daily Messenger newspaper arrives at the boarding house populated by the Kite gang with news of a promotional contest; "Kolley Kibber" is coming to Brighton. A promotional stunt, a representative from the paper comes to town distributing cards to various businesses that lucky patrons can turn in for cash rewards...and the first person who finds the person posing as "Kolley Kibber" and says "You are Kolley Kibber and I claim the Daily Messenger prize" you win a bigger more desirable prize. So who does the messenger send out to be "Kolley Kibber?" Reporter Fred Hale (Alan Wheatley), the one who broke the story on the Kite gang. I suppose, at least, they didn't also fasten a target to his back, but, really, that's like sending Salman Rushdie on a book-tour to Iran.

But, it's an opportunity for the Kite Gang, now under Pinkie's control, to take revenge. After all, as one of the mob says "Pinkie loved Kite and Kite trusted Fred. And if Fred hadn'ta written that paragraph about slot machines Kite would've been alive now." Pinkie is informed of the contest and it's his intention to kill the reporter.

It isn't long before Hale arrives in Brighton, before he realizes he's being hunted. Trying to blend in with the seaside visitors, he runs into a theater performer Ida Arnold (Hermione Baddeley) and when he ends up dead, she informs the local constabulary that the reporter's death is more than suspicious, but when they rule that the man died of an apparent heart attack, she begins her own amateur sleuthing.

It becomes a cat-and-mouse game as Ida busy-bodies her way into the investigation, while Pinkie tries to cover his tracks, using one of the gang to distribute the cards to confuse the police. But, one of the cards is left at a restaurant where a waitress (Carol Marsh) can identify who left it. Pinkie chats up the girl, asking her out, but when he finds out she can identify the accomplice, he starts a plan to kill the man. And, if anybody gets suspicious, he'll marry the waitress to keep her from testifying against him in court. 

It's an odd combination of an Agatha Christie-like amateur against the most vicious of sociopaths—Miss Marple against Hannibal Lecter—and the Boulting Brothers production team construct it in the manner of a Hitchcock-like stylist, contrasting the most innocent of local color and injecting pure menace into it. Greene was the most Catholic of writers, adept at creating angels and devils, and in Pinkie, he created a terrifying monster with savage intent and no remorse, a wolf among sheep (and a teenager!). Although the film ends with a note of deluded sanctity—Greene has a wonderful phrase "You or I cannot fathom the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God"—even Greene didn't believe in it, only providing a note of hope to get past Britain's supervisory boards.

"You asked me to make a record of me voice. Well, here it is. What you want me to say is 'I love you.'
Here's the truth. I hate you, you little slut. You make me sick."

And Attenborough creates a memorable villain, contained and malicious without a thread of decency, making one think that the sympathetic, cherubic characters he'd play for the rest of his life may have been some form of atonement.