ODD MAN OUT

ODD MAN OUT (1946)
Director: Carol Reed
Certificate: PG Running time: 112 minutes

Some of the features in this film: a haunting musical score, a frantic search for a missing man by his friends in a bleak post-war cityscape. – are repeated in Carol Reed’s later masterpiece, The Third Man.
  Set in ‘a city in Northern Ireland’ Odd Man Out opens with an aerial shot. The camera proceeds up the lough and zooms right above the Customs House towards the Albert Clock, so there’s little doubt what city is meant.
  Some of this classic British film was shot on location in 1940s Belfast.  For other scenes parts of Shoreditch and Islington doubled for the city. Clearly identifiable Belfast landmarks I noticed were the Robinson and Cleaver building opposite the City Hall and the famous Crown Bar.  However, the most prominent landmark is the Albert Clock. It appears in the background of many scenes.  Its chimes play a crucial part in indicating how time is running out for Johnny McQueen (James Mason) if he is to evade his pursuers and catch a boat due to depart on the midnight tide.  
  A group of conspirators meet in an upstairs room to plan a raid on a mill payroll.  They are members of ‘The Organisation’, assumed but not stated to be the IRA.  Johnny, the Organisation’s leader in the city has escaped from prison.  He’s a changed man.  He has had time to reflect during his time inside and on the run.  He has begun to doubt whether the ‘armed struggle’ does any good.
  Despite the misgivings of his true love Kathleen (Kathleen Ryan) and a comrade’s offer to lead the raid on the mill, Johnny insists on going ahead as planned.
  The raid turns out to be a disaster.  Johnny, last to leave gets tangled up in a fierce hand-to-hand tussle with an armed employee.  In the struggle both men are shot.  Johnny’s comrades panic.  They are unable to pull him into their speeding getaway car.  Johnny falls in the middle of the road.  After a lot of argument and recrimination they turn back but Johnny can’t be seen.  The bickering volunteers return to base, each blaming one-another for Johnny’s fate.
  Time is running out for Johnny.  He’s mortally wounded.  The weather is foul; rain turning to snow.  A relentless RUC head constable is determined to catch him.  Others are also looking for Johnny.  His Organisation comrade  seeks to help him for the good of the Organisation.    
  Others ‘help’ him in order to claim the £1000 price on his head.  Two ex-ARP nurses offer Johnny assistance only to have the man of the house turn him out into the snow. He doesn’t want to get involved. The mad artist wants to capture his dying spark of life on canvas.   Kathleen has the purest motive.  She wants to help Johnny because she loves him.
  It says a lot for this script that the audience is drawn to such an unattractive moral character as Johnny McQueen.  He’s a gunman. A killer. A terrorist. An armed robber. Yet you want the peelers, the traitors, the false friends and the mad artist to fail. You want Kathleen to succeed. To get her man. To get him on the boat out of the country to safety where they can live ‘happily ever after’.  You want it but you know in your heart that it isn’t going to happen.
 Odd Man Out showed that British filmmakers could match Hollywood for cracking stories and quality scripts in the late Forties. Pity about today!  James Mason was always one of the best British actors ever to go to Hollywood. Despite that, he never played a finer part.  Odd Man Out was Kathleen Ryan’s first film but it doesn’t show.  She was easily the equal of  Barbara Stanwyck or any of the American female stars of her era.
   This film would certainly benefit from a new big-screen outing,  In the meantime, the Granada DVD release has a digitally remastered print of Odd Man Out. Also bundled with the film is a PDF of the script, 1972 interviews with James Mason, a Mason documentary on his hometown, Huddersfield and still images from the film.