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Carol Reed: Films
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Carol Reed is one of the finest directors of his generation, whose best work was between the mid to late forties. Reed was a very intuitive director whose own life inform many of his characters. Arguably, Reed's films are deeply personal and often deal with loss and separation that ultimately lead to isolation and death. This somewhat dark viewpoint led critic Raymond Durgnat to classify Reed as "the most imposing pessimist of the British Cinema" (1971). Reed's characters frequently occupy a twilight zone, a world of uncertainty and doubt, characters like Johnny McQueen in
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Reed's first successes were followed by the uneven comedies, Who's Your Lady Friend (1937), Penny Paradise (1938) and A Girl Must Live (1939). Reed's 1938 Bank Holiday has more in common with Edmund Goulding's Grand Hotel (1932) than with Reed's other films. (4) Shot on location, Bank Holiday follows the doings of various working-class Londoners as they enjoy a weekend at the seaside resort, The Grand. Bank Holiday, with its episodic nature, irony, sociological subplots, and contrasting characters (young lovers, a family, single woman, retired man), established a British film staple. (5) Robert Moss regards this film as remarkable for its atmosphere, created by long shots of the seaside resort, quick cuts and juxtaposition. (6) Throughout the 1940s Reed used these techniques skillfully to produce both dark thrillers and riveting documentaries.
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Now considered the foremost British director, able to choose any subject he liked, Reed was lucky enough to hit on three good scripts in succession. Odd Man Out (1947), adapted from a novel by the Ulster Protestant writer F.L. Green, is Reed's first truly personal film and has 'major work of art' written all over it, maybe a touch too plainly (the influence of Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert's pre-war poetic realism, and the contemporaneous American noir cycle, is obvious). But Reed's sense of place - he preferred to shoot on location whenever possible - and his openness to his actors prevent the film being merely an academic exercise in style. James Mason brings an impressive sensitivity to his portrayal of Johnny McQueen, the wounded IRA man on the run in a snowy, nocturnal Belfast, struggling towards his personal Calvary through the gathering shadows of Robert Krasker's moody cinematography. Reed and his screenwriter R.C.
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Reed went on to work on some of the best documentaries to come out of the war, such as the Academy Award-winning The True Glory. He ... directed the documentary-like theatrical feature The Way Ahead, an unvarnished depiction of army life. The experience gained by Reed in making wartime documentaries not only influenced his direction of The Way Ahead, but also was reflected in his post-war cinematic style, enabling him to develop further in films like Odd Man Out the strong sense of realism which had first appeared in The Stars Look Down. The documentary approach that Reed used to tell the story of Odd Man Out, which concerns a group of anti-British insurgents in Northern Ireland, was one to which audiences were ready to respond. Wartime films, both documentary and fictional, had conditioned moviegoers in Britain and elsewhere to expect a greater degree of realism in post-war cinema, and Reed provided it.
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Reed's films are marked by a combination of sympathetic character treatment and sensitivity to political issues. "Odd Man Out," one of the hallmarks of post-war British cinema, follows a wounded IRA gunman on the run in Belfast. Encountering a cross-section of Belfast society -- each of whom may just as easily hinder as help him -- this character slides across the wet, murky streets in a constant state of insecurity and doubt. From this place of fear, the film expands into an allegory of redemption: the IRA gunman, who commits murder in the film's first minutes, becomes a conduit of goodness. While operating on a broad political level -- exploring the relationship between a member of the IRA and his war-torn country -- the film mines the human spirit and posits inherent tendencies towards altruism and community.
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With The Stars Look Down and Night Train to Munich well received in both Britain and America, Reed's second-feature years were behind him. But though he could now command better material, he seemed to be uncertain about what kind of film suited him best. The Girl in the News (1941) is a routine thriller; Kipps (1941), adapted from H.G. Wells' semi-autobiographical novel, with Michael Redgrave uneasy in the title role, feels stiff and old-fashioned; while The Young Mr. Pitt (1942), a propaganda piece masquerading as a biopic (Napoleon = Hitler, Pitt = Churchill), proved that costume drama was not Reed's forte. Still, his technical skill was by now evident, as was his sympathetic handling of actors. able, with infinite pains and care, to bestow on his actors the feeling that everything was up to them and that all he was doing was to make sure that they were seen to their best advantage."
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