Odd Man Out

[ChristopherBanks]

I was lucky enough to see this film on the big screen last night. What a fantastic picture...and very Wellesian, much more so than "The Third Man" - not just the visuals, but the depth and importance placed on minor characters and incidents that don't really connect with the plot.

Was Carol Reed a fan of Welles films? Or were they merely contemporaries from the same school of thought?

[Welles Fan]

Hmm...I still kinda think The Third Man is more of a Welles type of picture than Odd Man Out, but I can see a bit of a connection. Both directors worked best in black and white, and both frequently used humor in "serious" films. I guess the thing that keeps Odd Man Out from seeming as Wellesian to me is that it is so relentlessly tragic. I can't think of a Welles movie with anything like the tragic/romantic ending of Odd Man Out.

I agree it is a fabulous movie, and I've seen it about as many times as some of Welles' best films. I guess that's another similarity. There are many "set pieces" or episodes in the film as there are in many of Welles'.

[LA]

I don't know whether Reed was a Welles fan, but I'd imagine so. I think the Reed style (at least in the period of Odd Man Out and The Third Man ) is a little Langian as well. Or rather, it's Expressionist in a way that reminds me of Lang.

Reed was directing before Welles, though I haven't seen any of his pre- Odd Man Out work, it might be interesting to look at his earlier films and see whether the same style (or an early "draft" of it) is apparent.

Talking of Reed films, has anyone seen Outcast Of The Islands ? I've heard some good things about that, but haven't been able to find it anywhere.

Reed seems to have been quite an interesting director, it's a pity he's so often only mentioned by people like Charles Drazin, who have anti-auteurist axes to grind. I might post my 0.02 on his In Search Of The Third Man sometime.

[ChristopherBanks]

Hmm...I still kinda think The Third Man is more of a Welles type of picture than Odd Man Out, but I can see a bit of a connection. Both directors worked best in black and white, and both frequently used humor in "serious" films. I guess the thing that keeps Odd Man Out from seeming as Wellesian to me is that it is so relentlessly tragic. I can't think of a Welles movie with anything like the tragic/romantic ending of Odd Man Out.

Wouldn't you say that "Touch of Evil" and "Lady from Shanghai" have tragic/romantic endings? Seems to be a noir characteristic.

[mteal]

CBanks,
Odd Man Out has a Wellesian look to it, but Touch of Evil and Lady From Shanghai are much more flippant pictures. In Odd Man Out a sense of doom and gloom hangs over the entire story, like John Ford's The Informer, which is a film I think it bears a stronger resemblance to then Welles. As terrific as Odd Man Out is, it's a film I rarely feel the need to revisit because it's narrative is so simple (and so tragic). The Third Man to me seems more Wellesian because of the humor, the charmingly eccentric side characters, and, of course, because of Welles' presence.
There is a third Carol Reed film from the same period too, that has a somewhat Wellesian look: The Fallen Idol with Ralph Richardson.

[Welles Fan]

mteal: Well said. I tried to post essentially the same message earlier (but in twice the words), but it timed out, and my post was lost.

Another Reed/Welles parallel worth considering: Reed is best known for the B&W Noir films discussed here. After Third Man, Odd Man Out and The Fallen Idol, he made no films of great significance, and most of them are in color. Assuming Reed was something of an auteur in his prime as was Welles, are his later films the result of "towing the studio line"? Had The Stranger been more successful, would Welles' later output resemble Reed's?

[mteal]

Welles Fan,
One of the first movie books I ever bought, back in the early 70s, was called The Great Movies (I forget the author's name - Bayer?). Of the sixty movies listed, there were three Welles films (Kane, Ambersons, TOE) and The Third Man. In the Third Man write-up, the author suggests that Reed was so offended by all the critic's suggestions that Welles had had a hand in the direction that he vowed never to make a film of that type again. After directing Odd Man Out and The Fallen Idol, I suppose he had a right to be.

I haven't seen any of Reed's later work (excerpt for Oliver), and I must confess that, outside of the great Hitchcock and Powell and Pressburger films, my knowledge of British cinema is more limited then I would like. IMO tho, Welles did some of his best work as an actor for the Brits, in films like 3 Cases of Murder and I'll Never Forget What's His Name. Too bad he never appeared in one of those cool Hammer horror flicks instead of that cheesy Necromancy.

As for Welles directing more commercial films like The Stranger, I have my doubts about that. I think that, as a creative artist, he valued freedom more then success.

LA,
In Search of The Third Man? Is that the new book? I'd like to hear your 0.02 on it.

[Harvey Chartrand]

David Lean said Carol Reed lost his nerve after The Third Man. I would recommend Reed's The Man Between (1953), sort of a second cousin to The Third Man, set in Berlin, starring James Mason and Claire Bloom. After that, Reed seems to have lost his way. He made a few good films, but they just didn't have the 'magic' of his earlier efforts. Reed was fired from Marlon Brando's Mutiny on the Bounty. In 1968, he had a big comeback with Oliver! (Reed won a Best Director Oscar, but Oliver! looks like it was directed by a committee). The Agony and the Ecstacy (1965) -- about Pope Julius II strong-arming Michelangelo into painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel -- is a handsome, though at times turgid costume epic. Reed winds up his career with a very odd project (for him) -- Flap (1970), starring the multi-ethnic Anthony Quinn, this time as a drunken Indian. Reed's downward spiral continues with The Public Eye (1972), a lifeless comedy starring Mia Farrow. This was his last film. A hell of a way for the director of The Third Man to end his career. Reed died in 1976.

[jaime e marzol]

..............

i've seen a few of carol reed's films, and none have been very good. i know The Third Man struck a cord, and though i liked it, i don't think it's that great a film, cinematically. except where he employes the wellesian look in some street, and sewer scenes.

did not know he directed FLAP, which i saw about 15 year ago at a rerun house, and liked it. though it has some terrible moments with a cliche corrupt sheriff, i remember the whore house scenes were good, and all the photography involving that cool looking truck they rode around in was good. i think

FLAP might be the second most enjoyable carol reed film i've seen.

[LA]

mteal said:
"LA,
In Search of The Third Man? Is that the new book? I'd like to hear your 0.02 on it."

Yes, In Search Of The Third Man is the new book. Here's my 0.02, which mainly focuses on the Welles-centred elements of the book:

My first impression of the book immediately after I'd finished reading it were that I wasn't sure whether to keep it near to hand or throw it away. In Search Of The Third Man is a curate's egg. It has some interesting information, but there's also a lot of bitterness underlying much of the book. On the one hand, certain sections of the book, most notably chapter 13 ("The Heart Of The Matter") contains a lot of information that I had never heard before about the possible inspiration for The Third Man, although of course I'm no expert on the film, the information may be old news to others. On the other hand, some of the book is diabolical, particularly chapter 5 ("Stealing the Limelight"), which relies to quite an extent on the testimony of someone called Bob Dunbar, a rather bitter man who appears to have been a gopher on the set of The Third Man, and also appears to be under the impression that his opinion of Welles' acting and personality is of interest to somebody (apologies if I sound snobbish to anyone who may be interested in the views of Dunbar). There's a lot of anti-Welles stuff of course, to counterbalance the years of Welles being regarded as The Third Man's de facto director, but it goes further than redressing the balance, into utter naivety, for example, we find in chapter 5 comments such as "He ["He" is Welles] must have been rather envious of Reed, who was regarded as one of the world's great directors but also enjoyed the kind of commerical sucess that Welles never had." Now, perhaps he concievably could have been, I have no insight into Welles' mind, but I just don't see it, somehow. There's also a surreally bizarre third-hand quote of Joseph Cotten apparently saying, after someone noticed Welles sweating, after having fluffed a line several times, "Well, it was the first time that Orson had to act with me and he knew that I didn't think much of the way he did things and he was nervous."

All I can say is: What mentality cooked that one up? One that thinks Welles didn't act when appearing with Cotten in a film of his own? One that thinks Cotten would say such a thing about a long-term friend to a crewmember he'd only just met? Of course, yet again, I have no proof that he didn't, perhaps I'm naive and Cotten hated Welles' guts, but I just can't see it. As for the "Welles didn't have to act when he appeared in his own films" theory, it's a matter of critical opinion, and personally my opinion of the theory is that it's a crock. There are one or two other anecdotes in the book of a similar nature, mostly from the last, marginal surviviors of the shooting of The Third Man , which may or may not be accurate, caveat emptor.

Drazin points out that Welles' dialogue, apart from the cuckoo clock speech and the indigestion tablet line, was "otherwise in essence, if not always word for word [my emphasis], as scripted." He challenges Welles' passing comment to Peter Bogdanovich about having had "notions for the dialogue", and attempts to make out that Welles was exaggerating. The fact that rewording dialogue, and contributing one or two extra lines and one mini-monologue could quite legitimately be described as "notions for the dialogue" doesn't seem to occur to Drazin. The additional fact that Welles side-stepped Bogdanovich's "Every word of it?" question regarding the dialogue is also overlooked (by the way, the relevant page of TIOW is 220, according to Drazin).

There are more severe comments later by Drazin, attempting to make out that Reed's craftsmanlike attitude somehow made him the superior of Welles and Hitchcock.

Drazin's apparent desire to combine Reed-revisionism with attempting to bring down the auteur theory single-handed, appears during the Welles-related chapter and returns in longer and more tedious form towards the end of chapter 15. Drazin quotes Guy Hamilton quoting Reed on the "function" of a director, mentions Reed's admiration for John Ford while noting Ford's down-to-earth attitude (which he takes somehow as against auteurism), quotes Howard Hawks as saying "A very good man, asked to name the three best directors, said John Ford, John Ford, John Ford. And most of us who have studied that kind of thing, we agree on that." whilst seemingly unaware of who Hawks was paraphrasing, and takes a paragraph out to attack Hitchcock for his comfort with the auteur theory. Drazin then proceeds to praise Oliver! , saying "And for those cinephiles who calculate the worth of a director in the number of recuring motifs and themes, these really weren't hard to find": he then footnotes this comment with a list of "recurring motifs" (apparently sent him by a reader of his previous book) in Reed films which show how little he understands the theory he's attacking (for example, he tries to make out that some dustbins rattling in Odd Man Out and a silver tray rattling in Oliver! equals a recurring theme in Reed's work (I'm not joking, it's there in black and white). There's a lot of other stuff, but I don't want to analyse the whole book, most of the faults aren't of the magnitude of these, just small and frustrating (for instance, Drazin's claim that the last films of John Ford and Howard Hawks represent as great a decline in their work as Reed's do in his). Oh well.

Looking back over what I've written, I realise that I've not been very brief, and I've concentrated more on the faults of the book than on it's strengths (though that is because the faults come more immediately to mind). So here's my capsule review: Overall the book is a mixture of naivety and occaisional malice. Good information, bad author, worth reading for occaisional insights, and in his defence, Drazin does point out the various often-overlooked ambiguities in the production of The Third Man (Selznick apparently
wasn't as stupid as has been made out, for example), the problem is a tendency to bitterness, missing the point, and an occaisionally annoyingly nostalgic tone.

[mteal]

LA,
That's quite a review of the book, thanks. I suspect Welles will survive this latest attempt to vandalize his reputation.

[LA]

Oh, absolutely, I hope I didn't seem to be worrying too much about Drazin's little book, but it's a pity Reed had to be given such a treatment though, he could stand a sensible re-evaluation, but badmouthing two of the all-time greats in the name of elevating Reed is, I suspect, the last thing Reed, if he was the honest, down-to-earth person he appears to have been, would have wanted.

I wonder if any better-written, less bitter books about Reed and his films are available?

[Welles Fan]

It is annoying to read books that have axes to grind and don't concentrate on an already good story. There was a recent bigraphy of Napoleon (I spend more time studying history and the Age of Napoleon than I do on film and Welles) by Alan Schom, that was so laughable in its conclusions, I stopped reading it when it reached the year 1800. I later read a review of it by an eminent Napoleonic historian, John Elting, whose study of Napoleon's Grand Armee-Swords Around a Throne is one of the best Napoleonic books ever. He felt that Alan Schim's Napoleon Bonaparte was of no use whatsoever-unless it be to throw it at an unruly cat.
Actually, it was too weighty a tome to hurl at a poor cat, so IMO it was of no use whatsoever.
Sorry to go so far off-topic, but LA's review of the Third Man book made me think of it.