Odd Man Out (1947)
Directed by Carol Reed
Belfast police conduct a door-to-door manhunt for an IRA gunman wounded in a daring robbery.
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Mason delivers a sterling performance as the suffering fugitive, trying to reach safety even as he suspects his time is almost at an end — it's an especially interesting turn because his character is too often in pain to even grasp the actions of those around him, among them a pair of helpful nurses, a neutral bartender and groups of children play-acting as Johnny and the cops (their admiration recalls that of the Dead End Kids for James Cagney's Rocky Sullivan in 1938's Angels with Dirty Faces).
Sir Carol Reed ("Bank Holiday"/"The Third Man"/"Odd Man Out"), a renown director in decline in his later years, bases this sugary version of Charles Dickens' novel Oliver Twist (one of many film versions since the silent one in 1909, with David Lean's straight dramatic version by far the best of Dickens) on composer Lionel Bart's 1960 witty English musical stage version and later Broadway hit.
4. Reed kept three film crews working around the clock (a fact that amazed Steven Soderbergh and Tony Gilroy on the Criterion commentary track ) and had a productive creative partnership with cinematographer Robert Krasker, who shot Reed's "Odd Man Out" (a movie I watched right after "The Third Man").
The Third Man was directed by Englishman Carol Reed, who, despite making two other outstanding movies, Odd Man Out (1947) and The Fallen Idol (1948), was not one of the cinema's greatest visionaries.
Director Carol Reed had already helmed over a dozen pictures (including 1940's engaging Night Train to Munich), but it was the rat-tat-tat releases of 1947's Odd Man Out (good), 1948's The Fallen Idol (better) and 1949's The Third Man (best) that marked him as a world-class filmmaker.
Before “The Third Man” and “The Man Between” — the latter of which also starred James Mason and was featured in this column a few months ago — director Carol Reed made “Odd Man Out.”
He followed this success with two other classics in British cinema -- "The Fallen Idol" and, his greatest film, "The Third Man."
Working with cinematographer Robert Krasker—with whom he re-teamed two years later for The Third Man—Reed uses the language of noir to define Johnny’s journey.