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James Mason is wounded and on the run in Odd Man Out |
It’s a perfect marriage of styles. It opens with a sense of
documentary realism that would do Rossellini proud, the camera flying over its
unnamed Irish city. As we dive into the house where Johnny and his cell are
hiding out, planning a robbery for much-needed funds, the film tips into a
marriage of noir and classic gangster film. After the disastrous robbery, where
Johnny shoots a man dead in a scuffle, the film becomes more and more an
impressionistic series of vignettes as an at-times delirious Johnny stumbles
from encounter to encounter, meeting a host of people who help or hinder him,
many of whom want him for their own ends (from reward to bizarre artistic
inspiration). All this is intermixed with his own increasingly tenuous grip on
reality, some scenes floating and soaring with Johnny’s own fantasies and
visions as the bullet in him slowly drains his lifeforce.
As Reed’s film increasingly moves into a world that is a few
degrees less real than our own, you could argue that perhaps Johnny was dead
from the start. That this is his own journey through some sort of Dante-inspired
purgatory. His own odyssey, where he will encounter some who want to save him
and others who want to damn him. Reed
brilliantly helps us share Johnny’s vulnerability by taking the film ever more
off-balance. From Johnny’s visions of the past in the air raid shelter where he
takes shelter we spiral down into a surreal bombed out house and an ending that
has the sniff of Greek tragedy.
No wonder Johnny feels disconcerted, as this is a rag-tag
city with its own rules. Half under construction, half well-established, where
the streets are a mix of cars and horse-drawn cabs, Johnny’s journey takes him
from dotty housewives to tramps to saviour priests and Dickensian artists. As
his fever takes hold, so does the bizarreness of his settings, until he finds
himself in an abandoned grand house leaking snow from outside, being painted by
a drunken artist who wants to capture the moment of death on his canvas. It’s a
million miles from the forensic reality of the robbery that the film started
with. Yet it never feels out of place.
A large part of that is because of how brilliantly the film
invests us in Johnny’s journey – with Reed’s inspired camera-work and
story-telling pulling us into his experience. James Mason spends large chunks
of the film in silence, but his performance is extraordinary. A man who seems
partly aware that he’s dying, guiltily wanting to know if the man he shot died.
Who even from the start seems to have lost his purpose, doubting if violence
can bring the results “the organisation” wants, dazzled by sunlight after years
in prison, who leads his cell through habit rather than inspiration. Mason’s brilliance
here is capturing the very essence of suffering humanity, a confused and
frightened man who struggles to understand what is happening around him. Buffeted
by events, he’s sympathetic because he never feels in control.
Partly that’s because death feels like its always been
waiting for Johnny. You can see it from the start, as he sits in his hide out
wondering what its all been for. Kathleen (well played by an impressionable
Kathleen Ryan) can’t get death off her mind as she talks about finding and
saving Johnny or dying with him. Sympathetic priest Father Tom (a devout WG
Fay) just wants to have the chance to save his soul. There is a sense of
inevitability about the film – helped by Mason’s crumbling weakness – that
destruction is coming and nothing can avoid it.
Reed’s film also has a brilliant sense of the compromises
and shady questions of right-and-wrong. Johnny is a murderer and a terrorist –
even if he also is a man plagued with doubt. Kathleen is a romantic and a
fanatic. Hotel owner Theresa plays both ends against the middle. The coppers
will do their duty, but they don’t seem vindictive, just determined to do what
they must. There are no clear moral answers in this film, everyone has shades
of grey.
It all combines together into one of the most inventive,
dynamic and compelling British films of the 1940s by a director who was
entering a purple patch where he could claim to be the greatest director in the
world. This is a perfect fusion of styles – part realist, part impressionist –
that puts you into a cold reality before tipping us into a poetic neverworld
where the boundary between life and death seems blurred. With a superb
performance from Mason (and the rest of the cast), this is still one of the
all-time greats.
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