This classic black and white psychological thriller leads the audience through the dark rainy streets of Belfast,1946. Carol Reed’s film, Odd Man Out, based on a novel by F.L. Green, is deeply rooted in the film noir style. This film rejects the back lot movie settings of Hollywood and moves into the actual city streets, back alleys and tenement buildings. Shooting in the typical black and white of the film noir style, the city landscapes allowed for the use of shadows and darkness. Darkness creates a sense of fear and suspense, which the audience cannot escape from through out this film. The first dark scene in Odd Man Out finds the main protagonist Johnny, shot and bleeding in an old air raid shelter in a back alley of a tenement building. The darkness is used as part of the scene, a young couple enters, unaware they are being watched. Only a shaft of light from an illuminated match lights their faces, the effect emphasizing panic and apprehension.
The use of camera motion allows the audience to not only see but also feel the scene. In order to create a feeling of dizziness or delirium, Reed moves the camera in circles so that the audience can feel disorientated. This is used in two scenes in the movie, as Johnny emerges from the robbery and becomes dizzy from the bright sunlight and again in the artist’s loft where he is delusional from his gunshot wound. Throughout the movie, Reed’s cinematographer Robert Krasker draws us into the story of Johnny’s dilemma by his use of lighting, camera angles and vanishing points, into the black rain filled night, which is typical of film noir movies.
In the beginning of the film, Johnny our anti-hero believes that violence isn’t helping their cause and that guns are not the answer but during a payroll heist he becomes dazed and accidentally kills a guard. Now turned murderer he is a man on the run. Guilt stemming from the knowledge of killing a man leads our anti-hero into flashback and dream sequences that reveal repressive thoughts that are synonymous with film noir. Johnny encounters a few flashbacks, one in the air raid shelter where he mistakes a young girl as a prison guard, another in the pub where he sees the faces of friends in spilt beer bubbles and again in the loft of the estranged artist.
Our female role, Kathleen is not the typical femme fatale and even though she is in love with Johnny, she confides in Father Tom that she will take Johnny’s life to save him from the gallows and she will go with him. True to the film noir guidelines, Johnny is doomed by events beyond his control and the true tragedy of the film is that Johnny and Kathleen never find love.
Film noir was meant to reflect the true state of American society, the corruption and morality of the 1940s. Odd Man Out, an Irish film, mirrors the reality of what was happening in Northern Ireland in the mid 1940s.
Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out which makes it a classic masterpiece of film noir, worthy of it’s British Film Academy award for the Best British Motion Picture of 1947.
If you like Sam Spade style movies, you'll like this one. Starring a young James Mason.
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