Odd Man Out
Via Dolorosa
The Canadian critic, Hugh Kenner, wrote that Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot arises from the author’s experiences in the Maquis or French Resistance. Two underground fighters are assigned a dangerous and lonely mission. They are supposed to meet their anonymous contact at some rural crossroads to learn the final details for the operation. But the Gestapo or SS have intervened. The third fighter with logistical information has gone missing. Either he is dead or being tortured in a cellar somewhere and no one will see him again. Should resistance continue? “I can’t go on. I will go on.” Beckett, Kenner argues, has excised the circumstantial details of specific time, place, and person from his grim anecdote. By omitting factual circumstances, Beckett has transformed a particular experience into something that is universal.
Carol Reed’s 1947 Odd Man Out demonstrates this process: the film depicts a manhunt for a wounded IRA gunman during the troubles in Belfast, Northern Ireland. But Reed’s ambition is that the wounded terrorist’s plight show us something universal about the human condition. And, so, the action takes place after dark in an unnamed northern city; the dying gunman works for the “organization”, a shadowy enterprise that clearly represents the Irish Republican Army. The masonry stake of a big clock tower looms over the gunman’s desperate plight. The snow that falls during the last quarter of the film reminds us of the final paragraph in James Joyce’s “The Dead”: “Snow was general all over Ireland...His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and falling faintly, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
By abstracting and making universal, the dying gunman’s sufferings, the film evokes the notion of the pilgrim’s progress, the way of suffering that leads through this vale of tears to death. Everyone endures pain and despair. Our great enterprise runs aground. We are all betrayed. The clock tower looms over the shadowy and cold labyrinth of the world. The forces that will destroy us are knocking at the door. Reed’s film noir becomes an allegory for the fate of all of us.
Context
I have argued that Odd Man Out generalizes the fate of its passive and doomed protagonist. An ugly technical term for this strategy is “decontextualizing.” Sometimes, a film or other art object may seem “decontextualized” simply because we don’t know the historical matrix in which the work is embedded. Arguably, a United Kingdom audience in 1947 would have known the exact historical circumstances to which Odd Man Out refers. Therefore, Reed and his screenwriters didn’t need to supply information as to facts that would have widely known when the film premiered. But in 2025, eighty years (and a continent) distant from the events depicted in the film, a little additional information may be helpful.
As early as 1169, English and Norman forces invaded Ireland, attempting to annex the territory to Great Britain. What is now Northern Ireland was part of the kingdom of Ulster, an area of nine counties in the northeast part of the island. A long series of uprisings and wars characterized the relations between England and Ireland, but the English maintained control over Ireland for more than 800 years. After the Protestant Reformation, Ulster possessed a large population of Anglicans; of course, the remainder of Ireland was overwhelmingly Catholic. By the late 19th century, progressives in the British parliament argued that English hegemony over Ireland was ultimately unsustainable and, so, preparations were made to establish “Home Rule”. These efforts were stalled by World War One, a conflict in which Germany actively supported rebellion in Ireland and, indeed, provided munitions for that struggle. Things came to a head during Easter Uprising of 1916 in which the Irish rose en masse to fight the British. The Uprising was suppressed and many of its leaders publicly executed. A guerilla war erupted between the Irish Republican Army and the British in 1919 and continued, a campaign of bombings, ambushes, and murders, through 1921. Complicating the situation were the Unionists, pro-British enclaves located, primarily, in Ulster that opposed IRA (and Catholic) control over the country. In order to end the fighting, England and the pro-Independence Sinn Fein agreed to partition the country. Twenty-six predominantly Catholic counties were designated as the Republic of Ireland. Six majority Protestant counties (“Unionist” counties), all of them in Ulster, remained part of the United Kingdom. These six counties became known as Northern Ireland.
The partition that divided Northern Ireland from the Republic of Ireland was contentious and, ultimately, bloody. Irish Republican Army fighters infiltrated Northern Ireland and embarked on campaign of terrorism in that place. Communal sectarian violence between Catholics and Protestants led to massacres, arson, and other atrocities. Fighting continued throughout the later twenties and thirties with the IRA conducting guerrilla operations in Northern Ireland. During World War Two, the Republic of Ireland was publicly neutral, although circumspectly supporting the Germans. IRA sympathizers in Northern Ireland were rounded-up on suspicion of collaborating with the Germans and thrown into internment camps.
The Republic of Ireland declared its neutrality in World War Two and maintained relations with Berlin; there was a German legation in Dublin. Northern Ireland, however, as part of the United Kingdom was not spared German air raids. In fact, during the Belfast Blitz (April and May 1941) hundreds of Luftwaffe planes dropped bombs in the capitol city. Four separate aerial attacks occurred and a total of about 1100 people were killed in the bombardment – the Easter Tuesday raid on Belfast was the second most deadly air attack on British territory during the War. Large sections of Belfast were bombed-out and not rebuilt until much later. (In Odd Man Out, a critical scene occurs in an air raid shelter and Johnny McQueen is seen fleeing through desolate ruins remaining in 1947 from bombing six years earlier.)
After the War, the British released IRA fighters and their sympathizers from the camps where they had been detained in Northern Ireland. This led to increased violence when the IRA men commenced another low-level guerrilla war in Belfast and its environs.
At the outset of Odd Man Out, Johnny McQueen is hiding out in a safe-house in a Catholic neighborhood in Belfast. We learn that he has been in jail for an extended period, probably interred during the War as a German sympathizer. Contemporary audiences would have understood that McQueen is an IRA terrorist and that the “organization” is the Irish Republican Party. Most British police don’t carry guns. However, due to the sectarian violence in Belfast, police in that town were, in fact, armed as shown in many scenes in the film. Johnny McQueen argues for a parliamentary solution to the “Troubles” in the opening scenes and seems prepared to relinquish violence – he is openly worried about the firearms that he and his comrades carry during the raid on the mill, apparently, an effort to rob the mill of payroll proceeds so as to finance IRA activities.
A British audience in 1947 would recognize Belfast from the opening aerial shot of the city. (The city’s iconic landmark, the Albert Memorial Clock, is prominent throughout the movie.) However, neither the clock tower nor Belfast itself are ever named in the movie. The director Carol Reed created a replica of Belfast’s famous Crown Bar. The replica, appearing in the film as the Four Winds Bar (with frescos by the mad painter Lukey), was built as a set at Denham Studios in London where some of the film was shot.
Sources
Odd Man Out is based on F. L. Green’s 1945 novel of the same title. Green’s novel was hostile to the IRA and contemptuous of their activities. Carol Reed’s approach to this material is much more sympathetic to the “Organisation” as it is called in the film. R.C. Sherriff worked as script doctor on the screenplay. Sherriff was a prominent British playwright, best known for his World War One drama Journey’s End (1928) – a theater work that has been filmed several times (including a 1930 production starring Colin Clive made by James Whale) and often revived. Sherriff was a successful screenwriter – he received a BAFTA award for The Dam Busters and wrote a number of important British films. Both the novel and original screenplay end with Kathleen shooting Johnny and, then, killing herself. Depiction of suicide was verboten in the 1940's and the American Hayes’ Office demanded changes in the picture, eliminating Kathleen’s outright suicide by changing her death to “suicide by cop.”
The movie is indebted to John Ford’s The Informer (1935), a movie about an IRA man doomed because he has informed on members of his cell. Much of the film’s night-time imagery imitates German expressionist films from the twenties but, also, derives from French poetic realism, particularly Julien Duvivier’s crime film Pepe le Moko (1937) in which the title character is hiding out in the Casbah and commits suicide as the dragnet closes around him in the final scenes. Homages to pictures by Carne and Prevert are also evident to those who know how to look for such things.
Odd Man Out, in turn, influenced many later films. The ticking clock aspects of the movie appear in several films, most notably Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon. Roman Polanski lauds Odd Man Out as his favorite film. The great British director John Boorman also is a fan of the picture. The last sequence in John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950), the wounded “hooligan’s” escape from the city and his final death among the horses in Kentucky’s blue-grass country is clearly derived from Odd Man Out; a doctor recruited to treat Sterling Hayden’s doomed gunman says: “He won’t get far; he doesn’t have enough blood to keep a chicken alive.” Carol Reed’s own 1949 picture The Third Man starring Orson Welles imitates many of the effects in Odd Man Out, most notably the low-key lighting and the nightmarish chiaroscuro scenes.
Carol Reed
I have written at length about Carol Reed in my film note to Outcast of the Islands. Reed won the Oscar for best director in 1969 for his film version of Dicken’s Oliver Twist. Oliver! was well-reviewed and also won an Oscar for best picture, but Reed is famous today, primarily, for three pictures he made in quick succession: Odd Man Out (1947), The Fallen Idol (1948 with script by Graham Greene who greatly admired Odd Man Out), and The Third Man (1949 starring Orson Welles as Harry Lime). It is thought that Reed began to lose his way with his Conrad adaptation The Outcast of the IslandT (1952), although it’s my view that this picture is also mostly excellent. The Man Between (1953), a thriller set in ravaged Berlin is said to be a “rehash” of The Third Man. I haven’t seen the picture and can’t comment. Reed worked in Hollywood with Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, and Gina Lolabrigida on the circus film Trapeze (1956), a big widescreen technicolor production that was well-received at the time of its initial release. Reed worked again with Graham Greene on an adaptation of his novel, Our Man in Havana (1959), starring Alec Guinness. Bad trouble in the form of Marlon Brando afflicted him on the project Mutiny on the Bounty from which he was fired. Reed recovered with the large-scale production of The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965 with Charlton Heston and Rex Harrison). This was followed by the musical Oliver! and a couple of inconsequential films. Reed is the only British director (apart from producer-director Alexander Korda) to be knighted – this was in 1952 when Reed was acclaimed for having restored prestige to the British film industry.
Production Notes
About 20% of Odd Man Out was filmed on location in Belfast – most of these shots were made during the day, that is, before the heist Many of the atmospheric night cityscapes were shot in the Shoreditch neighborhood of London. Reed hadn’t been able to afford night-shooting in his previous studio-bound films – he made so-called quota quickies in the thirties and war years (that is, films produced to be shown as “quota” with more popular American films as double features – the “quota quickies” were made to protect the British fim industry from being wholly colonized by the Americans.) Odd Man Out was a prestige production with top-notch actors and expensive production values, including the lustrous and evocative night shots on location in Belfast or Shoreditch. Robert Krasker, Reed’s director of photography, distinguished himself with ingenious ways to shoot sequences in the darkness.
Many famous actors were recruited from Dublin’s famous Abbey Theater including Robert Newton who plays Lukey, Cyril Cusack, Denis O’Dea, F.J. McCormick who plays Shell, and W. G. Fay as Father Tom. However, none of the accents in the film are authentic to Belfast with one exception, the hackney driver Joseph Tomelty who plays ‘Gin’ Jimmy. The rest of the speech is accented in a variety of ways, perhaps, intentionally, to emphasize the universal elements of the plot. (This is a feature of the film inaudible to American audiences but much commented-on in Great Britain.)
James Mason
James Mason appeared in innumerable movies of every kind. After Odd Man Out, he was continuously in demand until his death at 75 in 1984. Born in Yorkshire (West Riding), he was a classically trained Shakespearian actor and began his career in the West End (London) theaters, playing roles in Shakespeare, Chekhov, and other repertoire works. For a decade, he appeared on-screen in supporting roles, mostly silky, suave and sadistic villains. He became famous for a part of this kind in 1945's The Seventh Veil, a psychological drama in which her torments a beautiful pianist (played by Ann Todd). Odd Man Out was an enormous success both critically and at the box office, winning the first BAFTA award – England’s equivalent to the Oscar in 1947. Mason won an Golden Globe for his leading role in A Star is Born (1954) with Judy Garland. He was notably cast as Rommel in The Desert Fox (1951) and appeared as Humbert Humbert in Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 adaptation of Lolita. He reprised his suave villain persona in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) and was in many other notable pictures – for instance, he played Brutus in Joseph Mankiewicz’ Julius Caesar (1953). He worked with Sam Peckinpah in the war film Cross of Iron (1977) and is superb in Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life, a bizarre film about cortisone addiction released in 1956. His final movie, The Shooting Party, features an excellent performance – Mason was hired to replace Paul Scofield who was badly injured in an accident on the first day of production. Mason died before the movie, shot in 1984, but only shown a year later, was released. I first saw him in Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959) – this movie is important to me because it is the first film that I ever saw in a theater; I attended the movie with my father in a movie palace on the amusement park pier at Asbury Park, New Jersey. (I also recall seeing Mason as Captain Nemo in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea first released in 1954, probably when that movie was broadcast on the TV show The Wonderful World of Disney.) It suffices to say that I have been a fan of James Mason all my life.
Mason is buried in Vaud, Switzerland a few feet away from Charley Chaplin’s grave.
On the passive protagonist
International film noir is arguably a reaction to the experiences of millions of soldiers and civilians in World War Two. French film critics were the first to notice a new strain of pessimism in American crime films – these pictures portrayed characters caught in a web of fatality and doom. Pre-war crime films featured tough-talking aggressive mobsters who built criminal empires and suffered as a result of arrogance and pride. Post-war film noir focuses on ordinary men who are trapped by circumstance. Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street, both featuring the nebbish Edward G. Robinson, exemplify this trend: pre-war, Robinson played aggressive mob bosses; post-war, Robinson plays mild-mannered clerks, “salary-men” lured from the straight and narrow by femmes fatale and destroyed. These scenarios arise from the characteristic experience of soldiers in a mechanized war: troops anxiously wait, helpless in the face of orders that will send them to their death. The experiences of civilians wasn’t much better – people hiding like rats in subways and cellars powerless against the aerial bombardment destroying their city. Far from encouraging heroic action, war induces a sense of helplessness and passivity in its victims. Johnny McQueen’s one attempt at action goes awry and he spends the last three-quarters of Odd Man Out laboriously dying. He doesn’t act but is acted-upon. (Of course, the character’s helplessness and quiescence poses a challenge to the film maker – it’s hard to maintain audience interest in a figure that is wholly passive; for this reason, Odd Man Out always seems to me to be about fifteen minutes too long – it’s the tedious proof of a theorem that we accepted as true before the film’s midway point.)
It is interesting to compare the post-war film noir with both pre- and post-war Westerns. Westerns, of course, take place outdoors, action occurring across great expanses of beautiful, if desolate, landscape. Film noir customarily are urban. Westerns proceed under the glaring light of the sun; film noir are nocturnal. The core of the Western, from Stagecoach to McCabe and Mrs. Miller, is action, a hero who takes arms against evil; film noir are about protagonists whose attempts at action are thwarted, helplessly waiting to be destroyed. Consider 1950's The Asphalt Jungle in which a botched heist leads to everyone’s death versus Jacques Tourneur’s Stars in my Crown from the same year in which a corrupt town is redeemed by the heroic action of a reformed gunslinger.
Where is this dance-hall?
In Odd Man Out, Kathleen stumbles into a crowded dance hall. The place is packed with people who swarm the dance floor. As Kathleen makes her way across the floor, various dancers grope at her or try to seize her arm, hoping to enlist her in the orgiastic frenzy that is underway. An orchestra blares a shrill four bar motif over and over again. There is a big sign prominently displayed that says: “No Jitterbugging,” but every dancer that we can see is performing the jitter-bug, hurling their partners head-over-heels into the air. Kathleen fights her way through the crazed mob and stumbles outdoors where the screaming motif sounding in the dance-hall pursues her.
This dance-hall is located in Hell.
A post-war emblem
The cabdriver deposits Johnny McQueen in a zinc bathtub in a scrap yard. The ground is black and muddy and the rain has turned into a cheerless, hostile snowstorm. A white angel, perhaps funerary sculpture, beckons to the wounded man. It’s an emblematic image of passivity and hopelessness worthy of Beckett: a man bleeding to death in a metal bathtub next to a pale, mutilated angel.
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