The Man Between (1953)

Carol Reed’s 1953 thriller The Man Between is sometimes seen as a kind of companion piece to his earlier masterpiece The Third Man, with both films dealing with war-torn central European cities and the aftermath of the war. It won’t do to push the comparison too far however. Carol Reed was not the man to make the same film twice. James Mason (who’d given a fine performance for Reed in Odd Man Out) stars.

Susanne (played by a very young Claire Bloom) arrives in Berlin to stay for a few days with her brother Martin, a British officer, and Martin’s wife Bettina (Hildegard Knef). Martin and Bettina live in a large house surrounded by rubble, not far from the frontier with the Eastern Sector. Bettina is obviously very ill at ease and she seems to be hiding something. Martin seems completely oblivious to this. Susanne however has certainly noticed.

Reed starts building the suspense right from the start. Nothing has actually happened but we feel certain that something mysterious and dangerous is going on and the fact that we have no idea what it might be makes it all the more unsettling.

Susanne meets Bettina’s friend Ivo (James Mason). Ivo is German, an East Berliner who spends much of his time in the British and American sectors (travel between the western and eastern sectors being no particular difficulty in 1953). Ivo is charming but there’s an edge to his charm, and he’s clearly a man who is involved in activities of a slightly questionable nature. Is he a Harry Lime character, essentially a crook? Or is he political? Both explanations seem plausible. If he’s political, where do his loyalties lie?

And who is the small boy on the bicycle who keeps popping up everywhere in a rather furtive manner?

Susanne hears Ivo and Bettina arguing frequently but since Susanne speaks no German she has no idea what they are arguing about. Ivo tells Susanne that he and Bettina have been having a bit of a romantic dalliance but that he intends to put an end to it before it becomes serious. Susanne is innocent but not quite innocent enough to be convinced by that story.

Ivo is certainly involved in something political but that does not imply that he has any political loyalties or convictions. Perhaps he does. Perhaps he simply sees opportunities.

I don’t want to say too much more about the plot because I think it’s better for Ivo’s actions to remain mysterious and for the viewer to put the pieces together gradually the way Susanne does. Suffice to say that the core of the movie is a series of extended chase scenes in East Berlin as circumstances continually thwart every attempt to escape from the eastern sector.

James Mason is excellent as always. He really makes us work trying to figure out what makes Ivo tick. We don’t know whether or not to like Ivo, whether or not to trust him, whether or not to approve of him. It’s the sort of ambiguous rôle Mason always played supremely well.

Hildegard Knef, a very fine actress, plays Bettina as a woman who is just as ambiguous as Ivo. She’s a sympathetic character but we’re not sure we can trust her and we’re definitely not sure that Susanne should trust her. Berlin is a complicated place (just as Vienna was a complicated place in The Third Man) and one needs to be careful and flexible in order to survive. Getting into trouble is very easy.

Claire Bloom is very good as the naïve but far from stupid Susanne. She and Mason certainly have the right chemistry.

Carol Reed directs this movie is a less flamboyant manner than The Third Man but there’s still plenty of style and plenty of beautifully framed shots. And yes, there are plenty of tilted camera angles. The suspense builds and builds as the two escapees find one escape route after another closed off to them. I don’t think any other director could have improved on these sequences. Despite the brilliance of the chase sequences this is also very much a love story and it’s a love complicated by questions of loyalty and betrayal, and deception.

The problem for Reed at this stage of his career is that he’d made three masterpieces in a vey short space of time - Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol and The Third Man. People expected his subsequent movies to be masterpieces as well. The Man Between is a fine film but it’s not quite a masterpiece and as such it has been somewhat dismissed. The fact that it sounded superficially similar to The Third Man only made things worse. The setting is similar and Berlin is used just as effectively as a backdrop as Vienna in The Third Man (with some great location shooting) but it’s not The Third Man. The Man Between can stand up very well on its own merits and needs to be judged as such.

Kino Lorber’s DVD offers an excellent transfer. There are numerous extras including an audio commentary.

The Man Between is a taut tense Cold War spy thriller combined with a troubled love story. It’s not top-tier Carol Reed but those chase sequences and the performances of Mason and Bloom are enough to earn it a highly recommended rating.

The Fallen Idol (1948)

The Fallen Idol, released in 1948, was the first of three very successful collaborations between director Carol Reed and writer Graham Greene. Reed had come up with the idea of doing a film based on Greene’s 1935 short story The Basement Room and asked Greene to write the screenplay.

The story had been set in the past in a large house in Belgravia but in 1948 such houses with a multitude of servants were becoming a thing of the past. Reed decided that an embassy would be the closest modern equivalent so the movie is set in the French Embassy in London. The early stages of the movie follow the short story fairly closely but towards the end it diverges from the short story in a number of very significant ways.

Phillipe (Bobby Henrey)  is a small boy growing up in the embassy. In fact he’s the son of the ambassador. His mother is away and has been for quite some time, recovering from a serious illness. His father is of course too busy to spend much time with Phillipe. The boy doesn’t mind because he has Baines (Ralph Richardson), the embassy’s English butler, whom the lad hero-worships. Phillipe believes every word of the tall stories Baines tells him of his adventures in Africa as a young man.

One thing Phillipe is learning about life is that you have to keep secrets. You especially have to keep secrets from Mrs Baines. He is afraid of Mrs Baines. Everybody is afraid of Mrs Baines, and with good reason. Phillipe has his secrets. And he discovers that Baines has a secret too. It’s about his niece. At least he tells the boy that Julie (Michèle Morgan) is his niece.

The secrets become important when tragedy strikes. Is it best to tell the truth or to tell lies? Everything Phillipe has seen of life so far suggests that lies are the best policy.

At the point where you think the story has more or less reached its finale it’s actually only just getting into top gear. Now the twists kick in. The lies multiply. There are so many lies that when someone tells the truth it sounds like a lie, and when someone tells a lie it sounds like the truth. Now we’re well and truly in Greeneland, and if you’ve seen the later Graham Greene-Carol Reed collaborations The Third Man and Our Man in Havana you know how cleverly Greene can deal with a world of deception. Once you start telling lies you just have to keep going but there’s quite an art to keeping the lies straight.

But this film not only has a superb script by Greene it also has the visual brilliance that one expects from Carol Reed. The scene with the boy on the fire escape is a typical Reed tour-de-force. This being a 1940s Carol Reed film you’ll be expecting some Dutch angles and other visual flourishes and he provides them, but with Reed the visual pyrotechnics always serve a purpose. This is a twisted world of deceit. Reed was at the top of his form in the late 40s and Greene was just starting to reach his peak.

What’s really interesting is that the lies are not told by bad people and they’re not really told for malicious purposes. Sometimes they’re told with the best of intentions. But they become a habit. Just as secrets are not necessarily a bad thing but they become a habit too. Lies and secrets can be a kindness, but they can be dangerous.

Ralph Richardson gives his finest screen performance. Michèle Morgan and young Bobby Henrey are very good and there’s a terrific supporting cast - Jack Hawkins, Bernard Lee, Sonia Dresdel, Geoffrey Keen.

There’s some definite seriousness here but this is not Greeneland at its darkest. There’s some humour and there are even touches of genuine human warmth. One thing you need to bear in mind is that this was an early short story by a writer still learning his craft. When Greene wrote the screenplay for The Fallen Idol thirteen years later he was an established writer just about at the top of his game.

The Studiocanal Region 2 DVD offers a lovely transfer and quite a few extras. There are several other DVD and Blu-Ray releases.

The Fallen Idol is a quirky film. It’s part murder mystery, part suspense film and part psychological drama. Surprisingly perhaps it was a major box office success. This is a truly great movie, one of the classics of British cinema. Very highly recommended.

My review of the original short story can be found here at Vintage Pop Fictions.

The Third Man (1949)

The Third Man, directed by Carol Reed and released in 1949, is generally recognised as not just one of the greats of film noir but as one of the greatest movies of all time. I’ve seen it a couple of times and it would make my top ten list. Now I’m about to revisit it. Will I be as impressed this time as I was last time? We will see.

Despite the international cast The Third Man was a British production. The location shooting (of which there’s a great deal by the standards of 1949) was done in Vienna. Although there was not only a second unit but a third as well Reed in fact directed almost everything himself.

Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), a popular American writer of westerns, arrives in Vienna shortly after the end of the Second World War. The city is occupied by the armies of the British, the Americans, the French and the Russians. Holly is broke but his old friend Harry Lime has tempted him to Vienna with the promise of work. Unfortunately by the time Holly arrives Harry Lime is dead, run over by a truck.

There were several witnesses to the accident but they all tell slightly different stories. Harry was killed instantly. He lived for just a short time. He lived long enough to pass on an important message. Holly has a bit of an over-active imagination and this combined with the odd discrepancies in accounts of the incident arouses his suspicion. British military policeman Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) advises him to leave Vienna but Holly is now determined to find out what really happened. Two men carried Harry’s body to the side of the road after the accident, but some accounts mention a mysterious third man. Holly is particularly keen to find this third man.

Holly tracks down Harry’s girlfriend Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli), Harry’s doctor and several of the witnesses, none of whom are very coöperative. He begins to suspect that Harry was actually murdered. Holly is right about the accident not being what it seemed to be but his theory as to what happened is quite wrong. Holly will find out the truth, but do we always want to know the truth? Does it actually help us?

When Greene was hired to write the screenplay he first wrote the story out as a novella which was later published (and the novella differs from the movie in several key points). This was one of the three collaborations between Greene and Carol Reed (the others being The Fallen Idol and Our Man in Havana) and those three movies are close to being Reed’s best work. Greene was quite lucky when it came to move adaptations of his stories. Apart from the lamentable 1958 version of The Quiet American most have been pretty good and several have been superb (not just the three films with Reed but also Brighton Rock and This Gun For Hire). Greene was a naturally cinematic writer, possibly the first great novelist to have a natural affinity for movies.

The Third Man has three huge claims to cinematic greatness. Firstly there’s the story. The screenplay was written by Graham Greene from one of his own stories. With Greene as the writer you know you’re going to get a tale that is literate and intelligent with a dash of black humour, deliciously twisted, and highly entertaining. There are plenty of typical Graham Greene obsessions in this tale. Betrayal of course. Not just betrayal of love, but betrayal of illusions. The idea that knowing the truth doesn’t necessarily make a person better off.

Its second claim to greatness is the cast. There’s Orson Welles, at the peak of his powers and in the rôle of his career. But he’s not directing so his performance is more disciplined that usual. Then there’s Joseph Cotten, a good actor who is well cast and gives his career-best performance. And then there’s Trevor Howard, again perfectly cast and in top form. Alida Valli is excellent as Harry’s girlfriend. The supporting cast is equally impressive, with Bernard Lee especially good as Calloway’s sergeant. And there’s an aded bonus - the always delightful Wilfred Hyde-White.

Its third claim to greatness is its stylistic brilliance. It’s so stylish that there have been rumours that Welles took a hand in the directing. No-one familiar with Carol Reed’s career as a director would believe this for a moment. Style was Carol Reed’s middle name. And if you compare it to other notable Reed films such as Fallen Idol and Our Man in Havana you will see exactly the same visual flourishes that you see in The Third Man. Carol Reed didn’t need anyone’s help to direct a masterpiece. And in The Third Man he’s on fire. Reed used visual tricks when they were needed. This was a movie that lent itself to a bravura approach. This is the world of Harry Lime and nothing is straightforward.

Apart from the absurd claim that Welles had a hand in the directing there’s the equally nonsensical claim that he contributed in a major way to the script. In fact he contributed one line. These silly claims seem to have originated with Welles. Welles’ career as a director ended up amounting to virtually nothing and his one really memorable acting performance, in The Third Man, was a supporting rôle in someone else’s movie. This must have rankled with him and may have led him to make these ridiculous wildly exaggerated claims.

Every single shot in this movie is exquisitely composed and photographed. There’s not a single moment that hasn’t had care and attention lavished on it. Cinematographer Robert Krasker won an Oscar for his work on this film. If it’s film noir visual style you’re after then this movie has it in abundance. In fact it’s hard to think of any movie that is more visually film noir than this one.

Mention must also be made of the famous zither soundtrack. l disliked it the first time I saw the movie but now I realise Reed was quite right in his judgment. It adds to the unique flavour of war-torn Vienna.

The StudioCanal Blu-Ray offers an excellent transfer and a host of extras. There have been many DVD releases of the film, some good and some terrible. This is one instance where, if you’re a fan of the movie, it probably is worthwhile upgrading to the Blu-Ray.

The Third Man may not be a perfect film but it’s about as close to perfection as you’re ever going to get. There’s not a single false note, not a single weakness. I said at the beginning that it would make my list of the ten greatest movies of all time and I’m now more convinced than ever of this. A truly great movie. Very very highly recommended.

You can find my review of Greene's novella The Third Man here.

Carol Reed's Our Man in Havana (1959)

Graham Greene had been appalled by the 1958 film adaptation of his novel The Quiet American. He felt, quite correctly, that it entirely missed the point of his novel. If any more of his books were going to be adapted for the screen he was going to make very sure he did the job himself. So when Carol Reed directed the film version of Our Man in Havana in 1959 Greene wrote the screenplay (he would also write the screenplay for the 1967 film of his later book The Comedians).

Greene has a well-deserved reputation for being dark and pessimistic but Our Man in Havana caught him in a playful mood. It’s certainly a very cynical spy story but it’s wickedly amusing, bitingly satirical and remarkably good-natured. The tone of the movie perfectly reflects that of the book.

The setting is Cuba just before Castro’s revolution. Mr Wormold (Alec Guinness) sells vacuum cleaners in Havana. He does reasonably well but he has a daughter. Milly is a charming schoolgirl but daughters can be very expensive. And now Milly wants a horse. Mr Wormold knows how expensive horses are. They’re even more expensive than daughters.

So it seems like a stroke of good fortune when he is approached by Hawthorne (Noël Coward). Hawthorne is the Caribbean station chief for the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). And MI6 needs a man in Havana. Hawthorne feels that Wormold is ideal spy material. Why he would think this is a mystery although it may have something to do with the fact that Hawthorne is a not a very competent spymaster. Wormold has no interest in being a spy but the $150 a month plus expenses (tax free) that MI6 is offering would buy a lot of horse feed so he accepts the offer. Things are definitely looking up. Mr Wormold is happy. Milly is happy. The horse is happy.

The problem is that MI6 expects Mr Wormold to supply them with actual secret  information, gathered by his sub-agents. Mr Wormold does not have any secret  information, nor does he have any sub-agents. He is worried about this until his old friend Dr Hasselbacher make an inspired suggestion. Why not just make the information up? Why not just invent the sub-agents as well? This proves to be a most inspired idea, with the added bonus that Mr Wormold can collect the pay intended for the sub-agents himself.

The real trouble starts when London, excited by the extraordinarily valuable intelligence he is supplying, sends him an assistant. So now he has to persuade this assistant, Mrs Severn (Maureen O’Hara), that he really is a spy. Worse follows. Much worse. Someone else, someone from the other side, is also convinced that he is a real and very dangerous spy and they start taking very serious steps to remove Mr Wormold and his espionage network from the scene.

The whole situation is of course farcical but the farce isn’t so funny when people start to get killed. It’s still played for comedy but now it’s black comedy.

Carol Reed was the ideal person to bring the novel to the screen. He was a stylish director and had shown a gift for combining ironic cynical espionage tales in his earlier masterpiece The Third Man which of course was also written by Graham Greene. Quite a few of the visual flourishes that gave that movie its distinctive display make a re-appearance in Our Man in Havana (lots of Dutch angles for example).

Alec Guinness is in sparkling form. I was dubious about Burl Ives as a German doctor but he carries it off rather well. Noël Coward as Hawthorne and Ralph Richardson as ‘C’ are delicious as Wormold’s self-important but ridiculously inept superiors. Comedian Ernie Kovacs is surprisingly good as the secret policeman Captain Segura, a man with an evil reputation and a cheerful disposition.

The DVD release from Sony is 16:9 enhanced (the movie was shot in the Cinemascope ratio) and the black-and-white cinematography looks great. There are alas no extras.

Graham Greene, having been an actual MI6 agent himself, understood the absurdities and the deceptions (and self-deceptions) of the game of espionage. This movie adaptation of Our Man in Havana is a delight. It’s witty and lively and combines a light-hearted tone with some truly savage satire. The superb cast certainly helps. Highly recommended.

Girl in the News (1940)

Girl in the News is a fairly early British Carol Reed crime thriller, released in 1940.

Margaret Lockwood stars as Nurse Graham, a young lady with a very unfortunate employment history. She had been employed as nurse to an elderly lady who died of an overdose of sleeping tablets. Nurse Graham was a beneficiary under the old lady’s will. Nurse Graham is charged with murder. She is defended by up-and-coming barrister Stephen Farringdon (Barry K. Barnes). The case against her is purely circumstantial and more than a little flimsy. Farringdon has no great difficulty in securing her acquittal.
This is all very satisfactory since we, the audience, already know that she is innocent.

A nurse who has been accused of murdering one of her patients, even if acquitted, is going to have trouble finding another position. Nurse Graham does eventually get get another job, by giving her name as Lovell. It is a position as nurse to an invalid, Edward Bentley.

Edward Bentley is a rich invalid with a young wife. After a short time Bentley dies, of poisoning, in circumstances that are extraordinarily similar to that earlier case. It’s no great surprise that Nurse Graham finds herself on trial for murder yet again.

Stephen Farringdon has become more than a little fond of Nurse Graham and he is convinced of her innocence. Once again he defends her, at her second trial for murder. The similarity of the two cases obviously suggests that she is guilty. It certainly convinces his friend Bill Mather (Roger Livesey) at Scotland Yard that she is guilty. Farringdon however has the idea that it’s the very similarity of the two cases that proves that Nurse Graham is innocent.

The centrepiece of the movie is the courtroom scene of the second trial. Extended courtroom scenes are a risk. By their very nature they’re talky and static. It helps if you have some charismatic acting. The acting here is perhaps not quite charismatic solid enough but it’s solid enough. It’s also essential to have the defence counsel pull some kind of legal rabbit out of the hat to provide the major courtroom shock. This movie definitely delivers the goods on that count.

Margaret Lockwood was probably the biggest female star in British movies of the 40s. She was particularly good as a bad girl (in movies like The Wicked Lady) or at least as an ambiguous heroine (in movies like The Man in Grey). She gives a good performance here although her character is more passive than the characters Lockwood usually played.

Barry K. Barnes makes a pretty good hero. He’s besotted by Nurse Graham but he’s no fool. When he defended her the first time he was fairly sure she was innocent, but not entirely sure. He ends up believing her to be totally innocent but his belief is by no means purely emotional.

There are plenty of fine British character actors on hand, including Felix Aylmer (one of my favourites). Roger Livesey is outrageous but entertaining, as usual.

Carol Reed’s genius had not yet blossomed to its full effect and while it’s well-made this movie lacks the assurances and the style of later masterpieces like Odd Man Out and Fallen Idol (and of course The Third Man).

This is one of six movies in VCI’s British Cinema Classic B Film Collection Volume 1 boxed set. The transfer of Girl in the News is quite acceptable although it’s certainly not pristine. These are very obscure movies so we should be grateful that they’re available at all, and at a very reasonable price.

Girl in the News is a neat little murder mystery/courtroom thriller. While the identity of the criminal is probably not going to come as any great surprise the plot does have some other interesting features.

Definitely of interest to Carol Reed fans. Highly recommended.

Night Train To Munich (1940)

Night Train To Munich was a fairly early directorial effort by Sir Carol Reed. Hitchcock had scored a major international hit the year before with The Lady Vanishes and Night Train To Munich is very much in the same style. It also attempts to mix comedy with suspense, and even has the comic relief provided by the same two actors - Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne (and they even play the same characters).

The events of the film take place shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. Czech scientist Professor Bomasch (James Harcourt) has developed a new kind of armour-plating, far in advance of anything possessed by any other country. Not surprisingly when the Germans forcibly incorporate Czechoslovakia into the Third Reich they are hoping Bomasch will work for them. Bomasch and his daughter are equally determined not to have anything to do with the Nazis. 

Bomasch’s daughter Anna (Margaret Lockwood) is sent to a concentration camp where she meets Karl Marsen, a dissident German imprisoned for anti-Nazi activities. They make plans to escape. The complicated plot involves a number of different escapes as the action switches back and forth between England and the Continent. Anna meets various people who claim to want to help her but almost invariably they turn out not to be what they seem.

The first of the movie’s escapes is by aircraft but the later escape attempt uses a train as its setting (hence the film’s title). Trains are of course always ideal settings for suspense thrillers.

Margaret Lockwood was one of the British film industry’s biggest stars of the 1940s in movies like wonderful historical crime melodrama The Wicked Lady. She makes a fine heroine. Rex Harrison might seem an unlikely choice to play a spy but he throws himself into the part with enthusiasm, and even manages to be almost convincing as a German officer. Paul Henreid plays an important but ambiguous rôle as Karl Marsen. Marsen is a rather complex character who doesn’t always behave in the manner we expect. Rex Harrison plays his triple rôle with a fair amount of complexity as well. This refusal to conform to lazy stereotypes is one of the film’s biggest strengths.

The supporting cast includes stalwart British character actors like Roland Culver and Felix Aylmer (playing a decidedly uncharacteristic rôle in this film).

This film relies to a very large extent on miniatures work and matte paintings to represent its Central European settings. Of course it has to be admitted that in 1940 the film-makers could scarcely have contemplated doing location shooting in Czechoslovakia and Germany! The early scenes representing German bombers flying over Czech factories are fairly well done but the movie is let down by the climactic cable car scenes which are rather feeble.

Screenwriters Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat had previously collaborated on The Lady Vanishes which obviously goes some way to explaining the similarities between the two movies.

The Criterion Collection DVD is not exactly overloaded with extras although it does include a reasonably interesting short documentary. The transfer is more than acceptable, with perhaps just a hint of graininess. Surprisingly, for a Criterion release, this one is not particularly overpriced.

This movie sees Carol Reed venturing into Hitchcock territory. The results are generally satisfactory although this movie certainly cannot compare with a masterpiece of suspense like The Lady Vanishes. It’s a movie that has always been rather in the shadow of Hitchcock’s more celebrated film. The comparisons are unfortunate - after all The Lady Vanishes is one of Hitchcock’s best movies. Night Train To Munich is still thoroughly enjoyable entertainment. Highly recommended.