A wounded Belfast gunman stumbles through one snowbound night while the city argues over whether to help him (1947)
Odd Man Out — James Mason as Johnny McQueen.
Film · British & Irish
Carol Reed
1906–1976 · British
British post-war thriller — tilted cameras, ruined cities
Carol Reed made three films in four years — an IRA gunman dying across a Belfast night, a small boy who lies to protect the butler he worships, and a black-market racketeer in occupied Vienna — that between them define British cinema's late-1940s peak. His signature was the canted frame, deep shadow and a child's or an innocent's point of view on adult corruption. He was the first British director to be knighted, and won his Academy Award twenty years later for a musical.
How to spot them
- ▸The Dutch angle: frames tilted off the horizontal to unsettle a scene
- ▸Bombed and occupied cities photographed as mazes — Vienna, Belfast, post-war London
- ▸An innocent, often a child, who misreads the adults around him
- ▸Three collaborations with the novelist Graham Greene, who scripted two of them
- ▸Cinematographer Robert Krasker; producer Alexander Korda
Key films
A small boy in an embassy lies to the police to protect the butler he idolises, and condemns him (1948)
The Fallen Idol — Ralph Richardson as Baines; the first of the Graham Greene collaborations.
A zither plays over a chase through the sewers of occupied Vienna, and a face appears in a doorway by lamplight (1949)
The Third Man — Anton Karas's zither, Orson Welles as Harry Lime; it won the Grand Prix at Cannes.
An engineer is blackmailed into spying in Havana and invents his agents from vacuum-cleaner diagrams (1959)
Our Man in Havana — Alec Guinness, from another Graham Greene script.
A workhouse boy asks for more, and is sold to an undertaker before falling in with a gang of child pickpockets (1968)
Oliver! — the musical that won him the Best Director Oscar and Best Picture.
A north-eastern pit village ignores a warning about flooded workings, and the men are trapped underground (1940)
The Stars Look Down — from the A. J. Cronin novel, with Michael Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood.
Key ideas
- Moral ambiguity as the subject: the sympathetic figure is usually the guilty one
- Place as antagonist — the ruined city does the work a villain would do elsewhere
- The camera takes the eye-level of whoever understands least
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Putney on 30 December 1906, an illegitimate son of the actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree
- •He began as an actor and stage manager for the crime writer Edgar Wallace
- •The Third Man (1949) won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 1949
- •Anton Karas's zither theme for The Third Man topped the American charts in 1950; Reed found him playing in a Vienna tavern
- •He was knighted in 1952, the first British film director to be so honoured
- •He was nominated for Best Director three times before winning for Oliver! at the 1969 ceremony
- •The actor Oliver Reed was his nephew, and he cast him as Bill Sikes in Oliver!
- •He was removed from Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) after clashing with Marlon Brando, and was replaced by Lewis Milestone
- •He directed part of the Second World War documentary The True Glory (1945), which won an Academy Award
- •He died in London on 25 April 1976
Drill it — 7 cards
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Sources
- Festival de Cannes — Carol Reed at the Festival de Cannes
- Festival de Cannes — The Third Man — Grand Prix, 1949