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Carol Reed: Graham Greene
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It was, of course... Carol Reed who gave remarkable visual life to Greene's brilliantly wrought script, a perfect marriage of word and image, sound and symbol. Holly's odyssey in search of a truth that is to destroy his oldest friend, the girl they both love and, in a sense, Holly himself, is conducted against the background of post-war Vienna, unforgettably evoked by Robert Krasker's powerful chiaroscuro photography which won him a deserved Oscar. The vast, echoing, empty baroque buildings that serve as military headquarters and decaying lodging houses are a melancholy reminder of the Old Vienna, the city of Strauss waltzes and Hapsburg elegamce, plunged, in the aftermath of war, into a nightmare world of political intrigue, racketeering and murder. The shadowed, narrow streets and the jagged bomb-sites are the haunt of black marketeers, vividly portrayed inhabitents of a disclocated society. There is a powerful symbolism, too, in the places where Harry makes his appearances: a giant ferris wheel from which he looks down contemptuously at the scuttling mortals, and the Viennese sewers where, after a breathtaking and shraply edited final chase, he is cornered, rat-like, and dispatched.
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Odd Man Out was made for the Rank Organisation, but with the creative climate at Rank hardening Reed moved over to Alexander Korda's London Films. And it was Korda, with his flair for such linkages, who teamed Reed with the writer who had spotted his talent a decade earlier, Graham Greene. Reed, Greene later wrote, was "the only director I know with that particular warmth of human sympathy, the extraordinary feeling for the right face in the right part, the exactitude of cutting, and not least important the power of sympathising with an author's worries and an ability to guide him".
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With The Fallen Idol, Reed began a fruitful collaboration with the distinguished writer Graham Greene, who as a film critic had praised Reed's work in the Thirties. They were well suited: like Reed, Greene always relished a strong story, and ... liked to hinge events on moral dilemmas.
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Reed served in the British Army during the Second World War, giving him many experiences which appeared in his later films. He embarked on an acting career while still in his teens, but soon went into the role of producer/director, and was responsible for The Stars Look Down (1939), Kipps (1941), Odd Man Out (1947), The Fallen Idol (1948), The Third Man (1949), Outcast of the Islands (1952), Our Man in Havana (1959), and The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), becoming a prime essayist of film versions of the novels of Graham Greene.
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It is not Reed's collaborativeness that distinguishes him from auteurs but his self-effacement. But self-effacement is the source of Reed's strength as a director. The third man is great largely because Reed subordinated self-expression to bringing out the themes and moods of Graham Greene's script. Reed's loving attention to visual detail and character tics in such disparate films as A kid for two farthings, The fallen idol, and The stars look down, seems key to their success as films. Variety is what jumps out from his body of work, and his consistent excellence across several genres is impressive, and a refreshing respite from a diet of auteur films. Unfortunately, auteur status has come to be regarded as the highest ranking for a director.
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Collaboration marks Reed's most successful films as he himself claimed. (3) He worked not only with the same writers (Kimmins, Eric Ambler, Graham Greene) but often with the same art directors (Victor Korda, Vetchinsky), cinematographer (Robert Krasker) and editor (R.E. Dearing). Reed served as his own producer during the 1940s and 1950s, only relinquishing control after the flop, The Agony and the Ecstasy, in 1965.
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