FILM OF THE WEEK!
“RAPTUROUS!”
– Time Out New York

“Has all the genre standards: haggard and world-weary protagonist, doomed lover, a robbery, shootouts, chase scenes through dark alleys, sweaty men smoking cigarettes. But we [also] get IRA operatives, fair-haired maidens, mill hold-ups, foggy dirt roads, and the consumption of heroic amounts of brandy. The film's ending is classic Noir weltschmerz, and Reed's stylized directing rivals that of the best American noir directors.”
– Interview Magazine (August 27, 2009)
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(1947) Snow drifting down a once-elegant stairwell from a broken skylight; a little girl with only a single roller skate; a seemingly omnipresent clock tower that counts down the hours to a midnight resolution: and a bank job to fill the coffers of the Organisation (the IRA, though unnamed) gone sour: one man is dead, Cyril Cusack and Dan O’Herlihy panic and go on the booze, and James Mason’s Johnny McQueen is badly wounded and on the run. And as his path to Calvary runs on from sunny afternoon to pouring evening to snowy night, it moves from suspenseful Noir to the almost surreal, while he’s sought by icy policeman Denis O’Dea, unspoken lover Kathleen Ryan, and ally Robert Beatty, with Good Samaritan Fay Compton dressing his wounds, bum F.J. McCormick calculating what he’s worth, bartender William Hartnell wanting him out, and barmy artist Robert Newton trying to paint his look of death — but is there a ship out? “The most complex manhunt ever filmed” (Pauline Kael) — and the first of the trilogy (followed by The Fallen Idol and The Third Man) that would make Reed world renowned and set him on the path of Britain’s first cinema; with Robert (Third Man) Krasker’s spectacular b&w photography making the moody settings and the (unnamed) Belfast locations into a true city of dreadful night.

AN MGM RELEASE

“In this summer of The Hurt Locker and its personalized politics, it makes good sense to revisit Reed’s Noir. Odd Man Out feels like the work of a stylist stepping up, taking a topic of the times and shrouding it in gentle brogues, heavy-duty spirituality and the ill-fated affections of a young lass. This is Reed’s arrival, marking a path for England’s postwar panache. The movie has a vaunted place in the context of British cinema, and deservedly.”
– Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York

“Sharply etched black and white by the cinematographer Robert Krasker [The Third Man], this [is a] significant British Noir... Although very much a portrait of a solitary conscience, the film offers a snapshot of a city still scarred by the war... Mason wrests much of his haunted performance from his eloquent face, where the ripples of pain and of horror at his own violence serves as an expressive counterpoint to the ominously enfolding shadows, narrow streets and looming buildings.”
– Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
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“Impressively displays Reed’s command of image and atmosphere... becomes an elaborate, poetic vision. The tension behind McQueen’s escape purposely recalls the existential landmarks Le Jour se leve and M, while the aesthetics of his bewilderment recall Ford’s The Informer.”
– Armond White, New York Press
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“In Carol Reed's brooding noir DP Robert Krasker fences Mason into a grid of shadow, religion, and fog, with a magnificent aerial shot to open the suspense account. Herein, Sir Carol proves to be an expressionistic and perceptive handler of cornered men.”
– Flavorpill

“Nighttime is rarely so enveloping and palpable as here.”
– Nicholas Rapold, L Magazine

“Superior, I think, to The Third Man. What really grabbed me at sixteen was the heavy atmosphere that hangs over everybody in the town. I still consider it one of the best movies I’ve ever seen, and a film which made me want to pursue this career more than anything else. It’s still fabulous, probably James Mason’s best picture. No film made me happier than Odd Man Out.”
– Roman Polanski

“Reed insinuates details that stick in the mind like the opening lines in a fairy tale. Krasker fills his nightscapes with wraithlike shadows and dazzling illuminations... draping Reed’s people in mists or spotting them in streetlights and headlamps, outlining them in doorways or profiling them against window shades... Through it all, Mason crawls and crumples his way to immortality, as a man who must measure the rest of his life out in heartbeats... Odd Man Out puts astonishing film craft at the service of a unique humane vision. We may never see its like again.”
– Michael Sragow

“It is hard to overestimate the importance of Odd Man Out to British cinema. It is a story of twelve hours, tragic and suspenseful, and in its use of Robert Krasker’s very bold black-and-white photography, it surely made a contribution to Film Noir not far short of that of John Alton. Above all, in presenting James Mason and Carol Reed, it proved that Britain had the talent to carry big pictures. Begins with the perfect realism of daylight robbery and proceeds through dream and hallucination toward religious expressionism. Much depends on the handsome exhaustion on James Mason’s beautiful face. Robert Newton sweeps the film into Grand Guignol, and he helps make us see Belfast as a Dickensian city instead of just a place where a man waits for midnight or death.”
– David Thomson

“One of Reed’s very best, beautifully capturing the poetry of a city at night (with black-and-white cinematography by Robert Krasker that's within hailing distance of Gregg Toland and Stanley Cortez's work with Orson Welles). It also has a splendid cast that wrings the utmost, and then some, out of the quasi-allegorical material.”
– Jonathan Rosenbaum