Odd Man Out

Johnny hiding in a dark place

The tragedy is Greek but the accents are Irish in 1947’s Odd Man Out, a day in the death of a wounded Republican man on the run in Belfast. The film turned James Mason from a British star into an international one and is often rated as director Carol Reed’s best film. Peckinpah loved it. Polanski also. Mason thought it was the best thing he ever did. An opening statement declares that this isn’t really about partisan struggle in Northern Ireland, where Republican Catholics were engaged in a long struggle against Protestant Unionists. And, true to their word, director Carol Reed and writers FL Green (he also wrote the book the film is … Read more

Our Man in Havana

Hawthorne looks on as Wormold demonstrates a vacuum cleaner

A quick look at the list of ingredients and the people involved would probably be enough to convince most people that 1959’s Our Man in Havana was going to be a cracker – but it isn’t. It’s a cake full of good things that isn’t, in itself, a good cake. Pity. The promising components include Graham Greene’s screenplay, the presence of Carol Reed as director – these two had already given the world The Third Man and The Fallen Idol – Alec Guinness in a lead role, plus excellent support players including Noël Coward, Ralph Richardson, Burl Ives and Maureen O’Hara, with location shooting in Cuba just post the Castro revolution and cinematography … Read more

The Fallen Idol

Phillipe and Baines

Of the three films that writer Graham Greene and director Carol Reed made together, The Fallen Idol is the one that languishes at the back of the stage while The Third Man and Our Man in Havana soak up the applause. That’s probably fair, all things considered, but that doesn’t mean this 1948 movie should be written off. It’s a highly intricate puzzle of interlocking parts with a plot about people trying to do the right thing, then failing, then trying to do the wrong thing, and then failing at that too. But the main driver is a young lad, Phillipe, the chatty and precocious diplomat’s son whose parents are so often absent … Read more

The Running Man

Stella and Rex

Say The Running Man and most people think of an underwhelming Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi/action movie from 1987. But there is another one, from 1963, starring Laurence Harvey, Lee Remick and Alan Bates, and it’s all about a man who goes nuts after getting a sniff of money. The action kicks off in London, where grieving widow Stella (Remick) is making a great show of burying her much loved husband, who recently died in a glider accident off the south coast. But Rex (Harvey) isn’t dead, and the staged accident was part of a scheme to get one over on the insurance company who had, Rex feels, got one over on him by not … Read more

The Third Man

carolreed thethirdman 11

So much is right about the Third Man that could have gone so wrong. Producer David O. Selznick wanted it shot entirely on studio sets. Director Carol Reed disagreed and won, which is why it’s shot on the dank streets of post-war Vienna, a city as overrun with black marketeers as the film suggests. Selznick also wanted Noel Coward to play Harry Lime, the role eventually taken by Orson Welles. Perhaps Coward would have made a good “Third Man”, a shit trading penicillin to the highest bidder and damn the children who die as a consequence. But if Coward had taken the role, there wouldn’t have been the “cuckoo clock” speech, written by … Read more