Documentary News Letter (1947-1949)

84 DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER ODD MAN OUT CRITICS IN CONFLICT Members of the 'D.N.L.' Board normally contribute anonymously, but when 'ODD MAN OUT' proves to be BASIL WRIGHT'S meat and EDGAR ANSTEY'S poison the Editorial 'We' is split 'A MASTERPIECEWRIGHT Before going on record as saying that a film is a work of art, and a fine one, a cautious lookaround is essential. In an industry where raspberries are reckoned in superlatives the critical eyes and ears are in danger of being clouded and bemused. Anything which rises above the level of mediocrity gives one a kick, and often one is liable to overpraise. Odd Man Out, however, has that something extra the others haven't got. Exercise your critical judgment as vigorously as you like, this film does what no other British feature film has ever achieved. It rings the aesthetic bell with as loud a clang as do acknowledged masterworks like Greed and Kameradschaft — to take two widely-spaced examples. Sense of shape, sense of drama — yes, including the unities. Command of technique so skilled and precise that it seems hardly possible. Impeccable direction of impeccable actors. Absolute certainty of purpose. These qualities director Carol Reed, whom we hereby salute with three times three, possesses in full measure. But it is in the richness of conception of the story he has chosen to tell that Reed is streets ahead of all but a few contemporary directors. He certainly ranks with John Ford at his best. Like Ford, Reed has not depended on an original screen story. Indeed he challenges direct comparison with Ford. Odd Man Out, like The Informer, is based on an Irish novel. But, again like Ford, Reed seems to have been helped, rather than hindered by developing his work from the novel-form. The transmutation is completely successful. The novel, as it were, no longer exists, but has been changed to something new — something perhaps better. Incidentally, F. L. Green, the author of the book, worked on the script with R. C. Sherriff. Anyhow, Odd Man Out is that rarest of things — a film about human feelings and thoughts and motives, all of which arc real and recognizable, and touched with true pity and terror. It would have been so easy to make nothing more than a cracking good thriller out of this story of a hunted, wounded fugitive from justice who evades capture for eight hours in the city of Belfast. But Odd Man Out is in no sense a thriller. On the contrary, Reed has devoted himself, with an integrity and intensity unique to the real artist, to probing deeply into the human heart. In a film surging with characters (literally hundreds, some only glimpsed for a second, but remembered longer), he depicts the diverse reactions of all sorts and conditions of people to the hunted Johnny. Johnny has — not deliberately — shot an innocent man during a robbery. Johnny is badly wounded. Organized society is mobilized to hunt him down. But Johnny is also a leader of a political party — of the underground, as it were. The robbery was planned to obtain funds, not for gain. So all the people who come up against the fugitive, and all those who are seeking him, whether as enemies or friends, have secret thoughts, secret motivations — and their secrets are made plain by their words and actions, or in their faces. To all this Reed adds a lovely fresco of children— pathetic in the true sense of the word. Slum children, bourgeois children (the little boys at the snowy window for instance), all of them weaving in and out of -the sombre story rather like the child characters of Dostoievski. The little girl with one roller skate is in my opinion one of the loveliest images in movie since the dancing peasant in Dovshenko's Earth. Again, this is one of those rare films which makes a genuinely creative use of sound. Technically it is one of the finest tracks I have ever heard. Imaginatively, it uses all the sounds of a big city, sometimes for emphasis, sometimes in counterpoint. There is a sequence where Johnny's girl, seeking to throw off a plain-clothes man, goes through a dance hall full of jitterbugging people. The band reiterates, fortissimo, a brief, inane, ugly phrase. She emerges. The plain-clothes man is still with her. She walks down a street to the priest's house. The plain-clothes man is still with her. And with us too is the repetitive, grinding echo of the dance band which never ceases till the priest's door closes behind her. Then there is the barking dog and the alarum bells as Johnny, deserted by his pals, starts off on the run. And throughout a delicacy of dialogue in undertones and whispers — better, or at any rate, as well done as in The Grapes of Wrath. Linking all is William Alwyn's music — a fine score which is clearly designed to be an integral part of the whole sound pattern. But above all it is people one remembers. Not types, people. We can understand them because they are real and ordinary — or, if, as with the raving drunken artist, they are extraordinary, we find in them the fantasia of our own sub-conscious. With Odd Man Out British cinema has at last come of age. In Carol Reed we have, in my opinion, one of the finest artists the screen has produced in any country. The film must have cost the earth. Unlike some other British productions, it is worth twice what it cost, whatever the price. For you cannot set a price to a work of art. 4A JEREMIAD— ANSTEY Now I hope I am not one to use the critical sledge-hammer to crack a nut, nor are my visits to the cinema devoted exclusively to the pursuit of social significance ; but I cannot escape the conclusion that Odd Man Out is a shocking film. Not so much in content or in manner as in the fact that it has been made at all. And then again less shocking in its making than in the eulogies with which it has been received. For more than one critic has acclaimed it as Britain's greatest film of all time; and this means greater than Love on the Dole, Song of Ceylon, In which We Serve, and Brief Encounter. Cast your mind back to Germany after the last war. In those days the morbid screen drama of the helpless individual struggling against malignant circumstances was high art. The incessant rain, the dark vice-ridden cities (The Street. TinJoyless Street) provided a setting for the tortures of sensitive souls hopelessly damned by manmade civilization. The action moved from sordid bedroom to disreputable cafe to brothel. And through it all loomed the agonized face of suffering Man. It took us a few years to realize that we were seeing in these technically admirable pictures a symptom of post-war defeatism. They represented the individual in escape from the hard facts of European life. Man had destroyed his own world and here was an attempt to scrape aesthetic satisfaction from the destruction. It was the hey-da) of schadenfreude, of happiness wrung from bitterness. A few years later still we saw that this comparatively harmless use of the film carried grave dangers. One had always been aware of the adolescent satisfactions to be got from luxuriating in the sense of defeat of those woe-begone productions (at twenty I still enjoyed every moment of them). But later it became clear that the mood which they represented, and indeed fostered, provided an ideal spring-board for coming totalitarian theories. The individual was defeated : what could be more enjoyable than for him to lose his individuality in some great, dark, authoritarian force'.' Is it unfair to consider Odd Man Out against this historical background and to find a parallel? It can scarcely be denied that at a time when the country is exhausted by war the film wallows in the hopeless plight of almost all its characters. Although the purpose of the revolutionary raid with which the film opens is to seize urgently needed money for the "Organization' and, although a large sum ofmonej is in fact stolen, the film carefully ignores the positive achievement, makes no reference to what is done with the money and concentrates us attention instead on the fact that the hero has lost faith in what he set out to do. The plot is careful to permit him no satisfaction, psychological or physical, of even the most minor order. The fact that his girl dies with him does not abate his tortured grimaces,