This is the seventh in a series of exchanges between noir enthusiasts David Lehman and Suzanne Lummis
Let’s go to the land of tea at four, a pint of bitter, roast beef, Yorkshire pudding and Brexit. Would you consider Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947) a noir?
Suzanne Lummis:
No, it’s better than noir, bigger than noir, more terrible than noir, an ancient thing—it’s Tragedy, and Tragedy of a high order. Also, it’s excruciating. I can’t bear the prolonged ordeal of the central character, James Mason’s “Johnny.” I managed to watch it all the way through years back, but in re-watching it—so as to address this question—I fast-forwarded through half an hour. It was killing me, the slow death of this wounded man, hallucinating from loss of blood as he staggers through a city in Northern Ireland. And we emphasize with him; unlike a film noir protagonist, he didn’t rob money for himself but to support a political cause. The story’s set during the “Troubles,” and he’s a leader of a group similar to the IRA. But, far more important, though he made a terrible mistake, a tragic mistake, he’s lately reevaluated his life while in prison and now abhors violence. Now, even more than fear of his own death he’s afraid that in a struggle over a firearm he might’ve killed a man. He asks everyone he encounters who’s seen the news of the robbery, Did I kill that man? Because of this and his suffering, physical and emotional, we feel for him. Moreover, it’s James freaking Mason, for Krist’s sake. That beautiful man, that beautiful face. What a performance.
One element that’s absolutely noir--the cinematography. Five minutes in I was on the Internet—who lit this?! And that was even before the story hits the streets, those night-time shots of shadow blackened figures fleeing through long alleys, and the faces of children and the aged peering out windows… Crazy beautiful. Robert Krasker, Australian guy, also cinematographer for one of director Carol Reed’s other great ones, The Third Man. Who can forget the first appearance of Harry Lime? - 40% acting, 60% lighting.
To paraphrase that irascible critic Kenneth Tynan, anyone who finds the stock CGI effects of, say, Avatar, with blue people looping around in the air inside cartoon-colored environments fantastically cool, but thinks the fierce lyricism of Odd Man Out is boring because it’s black and white. . . Cannot be my friend.
David Lehman
Odd Man Out is one of the great British films of the late 1940s, the era of Brief Interlude, Dead of Night, The Third Man, and The Fallen Idol. I didn’t appreciate the greatness of Odd Man Out until the second or third time I saw it, and now I try to see it every chance I can. Is it a noir? It can certainly be discussed in this context, as we are doing. If noir involves failure, a caper or heist or mission gone wrong, with dead bodies piled up on the stage at the end, preferably in black and white, it qualifies – but then, so does Olivier’s Hamlet, and we have another category for it. Jean Negulesco’s wonderful film The Mask of Dimitrios (1944) -- with a sneering Zachary Scott cast perfectly as the villain and Peter Lorre as the detective story writer who joins Sydney Greenstreet on his trail – has many noir elements, but we wouldn’t hesitate to characterize it as an espionage thriller.
This returns us to the problem of how to define noir, which Caroline Seebohm brought up when we talked about Hitchcock. In the Wall Street Journal today (August 13, 2019), the critic Terry Teachout ventures this definition: a noir is a movie “in which a flawed by basically innocent protagonist is presented with a moral choice, makes the wrong call, and is plunged into a violent after-hours world of passion and crime.” I admire Teachout’s stab at the problem, though, to take Teachout’s two examples, I wonder how “innocent” Fred MacMurray and Robert Mitchum are in Double Indemnity and Out of the Past. It seems to me also that no definition of noir will work unless it takes into account the distinctive lighting, the shadows, the chiaroscuro, and other atmospherics characteristic of noir classics.
Odd Man Out, because of its political and religious themes, differs from the noir films that readily come to mind when the subject arises, but I am happy for the chance to talk about it here. The evocation of Belfast in a dream-tangle of shadows is haunting. At the moral center of the movie is the doomed love affair of the revolutionary leader Johnny McQueen (James Mason), an escaped convict, and the steadfast Kathleen Sullivan (Kathleen Ryan). Father Tom, Lukey, Shell, the bartender, the little girl who lost he bar -- the secondary characters around them -- are like figures in a nightmarish allegory, and the movie has the feel of a dream. As one film professor puts it, the film is "festooned with gargoyles" (Kevin Hagopian, Penn State University). Naturally the robbery Johnny and his cohorts plan is meant to be his last, and it is his last though not in the way he planned. Naturally the robbery Johnny and his cohorts plan is meant to be his last, and it is his last though not in the way he planned. Naturally something goes terribly wrong. Johnny kills a man and is wounded in the process. Nobody was supposed to get hurt. And Johnny wasn’t supposed to fall out of the getaway car and get abandoned by his none-too-bright buddies.
I particularly like the scene in the deserted bunker when Johnny wakes up to find that the strange dream he had is true – he lies wounded and alone, susceptible to hallucination, hunted by the authorities. It is a very episodic movie, with Johnny’s progress like that of a pilgrim on his way to purgatory. There is the time Johnny is in the back of a hansom cab, which the police do not inspect believing that the passenger there is an ordinary drunkard. There is a wonderfully weird scene featuring the crazed painter Lukey (Robert Newton), who sees in Johnny’s suffering face the perfect model for an masterpiece of portraiture. Movies that make intelligent use of poetry or scripture hold a charm for me, and in a hallucinatory moment Johnny quotes lines from I Corinthians (13-11 and 13-2): “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. . . and though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.” The dialogue before the bloody finale is moving. “Is it far?” Kathleen “It's a long way, Johnny, but I'm coming with you.”
Click here to read last week's installment and here for the whole series, of which this is #7 in the series.
I really like the way you each approach the question with such contrasting yet similar sensibilities. Both you and David are noir aficionados and your knowledge enables you to place the films discussed in a far deeper than average context but it's not so esoteric that your readers are alienated. Your dialogue really makes me want to stop what I'm doing and watch whatever film you're discussing at that precise moment. In this particular chat I am really drawn into your comments about the lighting - that is both yours and David's. Lighting alone can get me to watch a film even if the plot sucks.
Posted by: Lois P. Jones | August 18, 2019 at 10:31 PM