Odd Man Out (1947)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Odd Man Out (1947) – C. Reed

One of the first DVDs I ever bought, but it has been ages since I watched it.  James Mason stars as one of the leaders of the IRA in Belfast, Johnny McQueen, who has been hiding out after escaping from prison but is now planning a payroll robbery in order to finance their operations. Yet from the start things don’t go right – Mason plays McQueen as tentative and uncertain and director Carol Reed (later famous for The Third Man, 1949) uses expressionistic touches to show McQueen’s wooziness as he gets into the car to head to the job.  Of course, the subsequent heist suffers as a consequence and McQueen kills an innocent employee during the escape while also being shot himself. He then falls backwards out of the getaway car, with his panicked partners leaving him passed out in the road.  From there, the movie depicts McQueen’s journey through the snowy night in Belfast, encountering numerous supposed loyalists and other friendly souls, none of whom assist him enough to help him back to safety. At the same time, McQueen experiences delirious hallucinations, as he is both dying and coming to terms with his crimes. There is a burning spiritual fever in Johnny as he attempts to avoid the police dragnet – but to what end? Kathleen Ryan is in love with Johnny and wants to rescue him, but neither she nor anyone else can see a way forward beyond Johnny’s pre-ordained fate. Reed and cinematographer Robert Krasker shot the film as a blend of postwar neo-realism (the slums of Belfast), film noir (the chiaroscuro lighting and dark themes), and expressionism (McQueen’s visions distort reality). To me, the film seems to share structure and themes with Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995), which also follows a man on a journey from life to death, offering a critique of society on the way. In both films, humans struggle with difficult moral decisions where right and wrong can confusingly depend on the eye of the beholder.  Yet, at the end of the day, as the police inspector hunting Johnny succinctly states, for him, there is neither bad nor good, only innocence and guilt.

 

Rebecca (1940)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Rebecca (1940) – A. Hitchcock

Less a thriller or a suspense film than a gothic melodrama (popular at the time: Wuthering Heights, 1939; Gaslight, 1940/1944, etc.) which stayed true to the novel by Daphne du Maurier (purchased for Hitchcock by producer David O. Selznick). Joan Fontaine is the awkward young woman (a paid companion for a boorish and matronly society lady) who meets wealthy Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier) at Monte Carlo where he is vacationing, trying to escape memories of his late wife, Rebecca. After a whirlwind romance, Fontaine’s character becomes the new Mrs. de Winter and takes her place as the head of the household at the beautiful and remote English mansion Manderley. From the start, she feels that she does not measure up to the beautiful and sophisticated Rebecca and this feeling is encouraged by Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson), the unfriendly and hard-hearted housekeeper who was overly fond of the previous Mrs. de Winter (some reviewers have suggested a same-sex attraction). Husband Max does not make things any easier for Fontaine’s character (who is given no first name), often reacting angrily and moodily when Rebecca comes up – and indeed, since there are monogrammed R’s everywhere in the house, this is very often.  In their excellent book about Hitch, Rohmer and Chabrol point out that pairing an emotional woman with an unemotional man in a two-shot became a trope of the director, something I never noticed before (but is clear in Notorious, 1946, too).  Fontaine impresses as she transforms from vulnerable and insecure to become a more confident partner to Olivier -- and both of them, as well as Anderson, received Oscar nods in addition to Hitchcock himself along with best screenplay, score, and a slew of technical category nominations. The film won Best Picture and Best Cinematography, which held true to the Gothic style and produced an air of mystery and ultimately suspense -- which Hitch injects into the film in its final minutes as a startling twist is introduced and foppish cad George Sanders almost destroys the burgeoning romance between Olivier and Fontaine.  When Truffaut suggested to Hitchcock that he developed his interest in the psychological dynamics of his characters when working on this film, the great director agreed.  A must-see.