Odd Man Out

Simply and obviously put, Odd Man Out (1947) is, in fact, an odd picture.  From its first shot, things seem off-kilter.  The camera shows us a city with harbor and river, but the aerial footage is strangely tilted, as if the place shown is about to slide away off the edge of the earth.  As the camera comes closer to the warren of tenements and alleys, we see a strange tower standing isolated in a square, a weird masonry spike that isn't attached to any other buildings.  At ground level, in the succeeding shot, we are shown the plaza under the pillar of masonry --it is revealed to be a clocktower and the gnomon around which the movie turns; the events in the film take place over about 12 hours as measured by the clockface atop the tower. A man is reading a newspaper as the camera pans rapidly to the right showing the square -- this shot replicates the opening of the director Carol Reed's Outcast of the Islands in which the camera pans to the right across a busy harbor with ships and coolies and, ultimately, an elephant posing eloquently against a building where the camera's motion comes to a stop.  Reed's best movies are those in which he carefully and, with brilliant details, establishes the film's milieu and the opening shots in Odd Man Out, somehow off-balance in a way that is, more or less, indescribable, set the tone for the grim tale that follows.

An IRA operative named Johnny McQueen (James Mason) has escaped from jail and has been hiding in a safe house in Belfast for the six months preceding the film's action.  The home in which Johnny has been confined is like something out of Joyce's Dubliners, shabby genteel with garish religious pictures on the wall, an impoverished place that seems too small for the gathering of eight or nine members of the "Organization" as the IRA is called in this picture -- the movie comes with a disclaimer asserting that it is not about politics, an advisory that here turns out to be true; the film's subject, in fact, is metaphysical.  The gang is plotting a raid on a local mill to seize payroll and, then, distribute that money for use in the terrorists' operations.  Johnny is the "chief" but he seems a bit loopy, distracted, and his gang members, particularly a good friend named Dennis, dispute his ability to pull off the heist -- he's become too soft due to his imprisonment both in the local jail and within this safe house.  (Needless to say, the safe house comes with an Irish granny and her granddaughter, Kathleen, Johnny's love interest in the film.)  Johnny thinks he must lead the raid, but upon being driven to the mill, the space and sound of the city around him are disorienting, and, in fact, he seems a bit baffled by the hubbub and confusion in the West Belfast streets.  (Exteriors were shot on location in the Northern Ireland city).  At the mill, things go badly wrong; an alarm is triggered and Johnny grapples with a security officer on the steps of the mill building.  A gun goes off and Johnny is shot in the left upper chest; there's a second shot fired that kills the security guard.  The rebels flee in confusion and the wounded Johnny, dangling half-in and half-out of the sedan, gets thrown out on the street.  The Organization thugs are afraid to reverse their vehicle to pick him up and, in any event, Johnny lies motionlessly sprawled on the lane, possibly dead.  And, so, the IRA men flee.  Johnny gets up, staggers into a ramshackle construction site, and hides in a narrow brick room with an open door.  He's badly hurt, stunned, and delirious.  When some local kids kick a soccer ball into his refuge, he hallucinates a prison guard who speaks kindly to him and holds the ball in his arms.  (Later, coming to his senses, he sees a frightened little girl standing in the corner of the brick bunker, staring at him with wide eyes.)  Sirens are sounding and there are checkpoints on the streets and a police dragnet is closing in on the wounded man.  

The rest of the film consists of increasingly surreal episodes involving Johnny's attempts to escape the tightening police cordon aided in some instances by IRA gang members.  The film is a masterpiece and gripping from beginning to end -- it is also far stranger than you might expect, full of bizarre interludes. From the outset it's clear, that the local folks don't want anything to do with gunmen from the Organization -- they've seen what happens when they intervene (or are blamed for intervening) and, so, there is a motif in the film of old women closing windows when they glimpse Johnny or his gang members on the mean streets below.  Belfast is a maze of tiny alleys and wretched-looking tenements and rowhouses.  The place is claustrophobic and the walls seem to drawing closer and ever closer.  In some areas, there are strange crowds of people, for instance, on a hallucinated street car in which people are packed like sardines.  Everywhere, small feral children are scampering around -- some of them imitate the wounded Johnny McQueen and wrestle, pretending to capture and kill him.  (Reed doesn't sentimentalize the children who seem as cruel and indifferent as the adults; Peckinpah admired this movie immensely and one can see its influence on the American director, for instance, the mobs of Mexican children torturing scorpions and playing cowboys and Indians.  Reed's later work, also a great film, The Outcast of the Islands is similarly notable for it decidedly unromantic vision hundreds of children diving into water and tormenting Terence Howard in the stilt-village on a lagoon in Borneo.)  Three of the gang members take refuge from the marauding police in what seems to be a brothel operated by a fat, lascivious old woman who turns out to be a traitor -- she's related to one of the IRA gangsters but needs police protection for her business.  One of the men distrusts the old woman and flees but the other two remain swilling her booze while she calls the cops.  The police arrive and there's a gun-battle in which the two "Organization" men are shot down on the street in front of her home, the fat old broad denying any knowledge of where they came from.  The third fellow escapes.  Dennis, Johnny's friend, finds the wounded man hiding in cellar-like bunker and wrapping his left arm in a bandage misleads the cops into chasing him.  There's an exciting nocturnal pursuit through the dark streets and, at last, Dennis is captured.  (This sequence involves mayhem in a crowded streetcar omnibus; this scene is typical of the film's fantastic and bizarre staging of its action scene:  men are wrestling and hitting each other in a space too tightly crowded for them to even be able to throw punches:  Dennis knocks out a window on the bus in an effort to escape but is apprehended -- all of chaos is very tangible and you wince at the sharp shards of broken glass falling on the cobblestones when Dennis somersaults out of the vehicle.)  Many of the picture's action and suspense scenes are, perhaps, even superior to similar work by Alfred Hitchcock.  Johnny manages to escape due to Dennis' sacrifice, although as he's staggering across an intersection, a truck almost hits him and he's flung to the ground.  Two biddies pick him up -- they are good Samaritans -- and take him to their nearby flat, bickering all the time.  The two women seem to be a middle-aged Lesbian couple but this probably is a figment of my imagination -- one of them has a husband who arrives and throws Johnny back out on the street.  One of the women knows first aid but when she uncovers Johnny's wound, which we really don't see except in glimpses -- he has blood draining down onto his fingers --she is horrified; this is a motif throughout the film.  Johnny has been given a slug of whisky as a pain-killer and later he's mistaken for a drunk.  This turns out to be beneficial protective coloration, as it were -- there are lots of drunks in Belfast and the cops are habituated to ignoring them.  A little tramp named Shell helps Johnny stagger to a junkyard where he is pushed into a bathtub where he reposes as the air fills with snow.  The weather has been atrocious, first rain, then, sleet (we see one of the IRA men fall on ice) and, now, heavy snow.  The junkyard where Johnny lies dying is full of grotesque religious figures, stone angels and the like and a train chugs by periodically sounding its whistle morosely and spilling big plumes of steam and smoke into the air.  Shell goes to the church across from the clock tower.  He tries to sell Johnny to the priest.  The priest Father Tom is an upright man and kindly but he knows that Johnny has killed a man and says he will have to turn the outlaw into the authorities.  (From time to time, various people are tempted by a 1000 pound bounty on Johnny's head.)  Shell is an eccentric figure; he lives in a ruined mansion, once palatial but now so badly damaged that snow falls in shafts through its majestic, if destroyed, ceilings.  A deranged painter. Lukey, has a studio, probably a squat, in the ruinous mansion and he is painting an image of a saint, despairing that he can't capture the despair and ecstasy on the face of his martyr.  By this time, Kathleen has arranged for Johnny's safe-passage out of Belfast on a ship, but she has to get him on-board by 11:00.  She goes to Father Tom, apparently on the belief that the priest knows everything about everyone.  Father Tom tells her that he can't support her plan to help Johnny escape and that he will call the authorities if the wounded IRA man appears in his church.  Kathleen says that she doesn't want to live if Johnny dies and plans to commit suicide, declarations that horrify Father Tom.  Shell goes to Johnny who is half-frozen in the junkyard  and starts to drag the dying man to the Church.  But Johnny gets into a taxi, a horse-drawn hackney carriage and is driven around town for awhile.  When he's discovered in the hack, the driver drags him out and deposits him in a big, rather lavishly appointed pub.  No one wants him around, but there are no good ideas as to what to do with the wounded man.  The pub proprietor locks him in a "snug" -- that is, a private compartment in the tavern where Johnny, now missing most of his blood, hallucinates and passes out.  Shell, with the mad painter Lukey, shows up, and there's another riot in the pub with drunken men flailing around and breaking things.  James Mason who plays Johnny has a beautiful gaunt face, spiritualized by his loss of blood, and Lukey wants to use him as a model to complete the painting of the saint on which he is working.  Shell and Lukey manage to drag Johnny to the painter's atelier, a bizarre space with high ornate ceilings, dozens of canvases stacked around, and snow falling here and there through rifts in the roof.  Tobar, a failed medical student, supplies some first aid and Johnny is posed on a sort of dilapidated throne while Lukey paints him.  Kathleen finds him and they limp very slowly out into the blizzard -- the clocktower is now striking midnight and, it seems, that the vessel that was going to transport the wounded man away from Belfast has departed.  In the square, Kathleen and Johnny stand against a dead end wall as a dozen cops with two squad cars slowly advance across the snowy paving stones.  

The film is full of peculiar interludes.  In one scene, the old granny remarks that Irish Republican men are always going out to save their people but never returning -- she points to a picture of her as a bride and says that she was.at 19, every bit as lovely as Kathleen to whom she is speaking.  After her first love was killed, she married again and had eleven children and, as far as she is concerned, has lived happily; she begs Katheen to abandon Johnny and do the same.  This speech is inexplicably moving and will bring tears to your eyes.  In general terms, the movie seems to have influenced Akira Kurosawa whose great Ikiru ("To Live") involves a dying man wandering around Tokyo, encountering various peculiar people, and ultimately perishing in a snow storm in the children's playground that he has financed.  I have always thought that I saw Odd Man Out many years ago and didn't much like it.  This turns out to be a false memory.  The film that I saw was undoubtedly John Ford's 1935 The Informer, a picture that has a similar subject matter.  Once seen, you will not forget this picture and it is much stranger, more unconventional, and philosophical than the Ford movie.  The actors, all alumni of Dublin's Abbey Theater, are exceptional.  James Mason is excellent, although people who know about such things observe that no one is able to convincingly speak in an Ulster accent -- something, of course, that I can't judge.  The film resists any easy interpretation but, ultimately, like the Kurosawa picture, suggests that all of us are dying and that Johnny's story will one day be our story as well.  Some of the people confronted by the wounded man behave kindly; others regard him purely instrumental terms -- that is, as a basis for earning a reward or, like the painter, as a subject for their own private obsessions.  (The painter seems to me to represent the film's project:  that is, portraying the martyrdom of the protagonist; when Lukey is done with the picture -- recall that St. Luke was a painter -- he gazes at his canvas with horror and contempt and casts it away.)  The strange society of tramps and outcasts gives a surreal tinge to the picture, for instance, Shell's comments about Johnny are always framed in terms of one of his parakeets with a broken left wing -- he speaks in code, but his references to Johnny as a winged being rhyme with the junkyard scenes in which a spooky, bland-looking angel hovers over the dying man.  David Thomson and others have lamented the film's turn toward the spiritual in its last two reels.  I think these critics misunderstand the picture.  The Catholic imagery is used ironically -- in my estimation, the ending of the film shows the absolute poverty of any means of salvation.  This is a world empty of all religious meaning -- the priest is a weakling agent of the State.  I don't see any trace of redemption in the picture's bleak ending.  Odd Man Out is a great movie and I'm ashamed to say that I had never seen this picture until this late stage in my life.