A Film Canon

A syncretic masterpiece, Odd Man Out fuses noir, neorealism and poetic realism to present one of the most extraordinary cinematic cityscapes to date. Like his Italian forebears, Reed presents a contested zone - an unnamed Northern Irish city, presumably Belfast - suffused with children and urchins; like his French forebears, he structures it around the port's illusory promise of escape; and, finally, like his American contemporaries, he fragments and rearranges it to labyrinthine proportions. This finds narrative expression as wounded I.R.A. operative Johnny McQueen's (James Mason) desperate journey from the scene of an unsuccessful heist to the docks, by way of a panorama of encounters that range from the most direct (the two nurses who recognise him and briefly care for him) to the most fleeting (the children who don't even realise that he has temporarily sheltered in their garden), and encompass the most visible (the police, military, clergy) and invisible (a dilpadiated house inhabited by an alcoholic, mad artist and failed doctor) demographics. Although Johnny has virtually no dialogue, the journey is suffused with his sensory debiliation, which doesn't merely result from having been shot, but from having been closeted for the world for six months prior to the heist. This informs a series of subsidiary, disoriented figures - a girl with a sty, a woman with a lazy eye, another girl with a roller skate on one leg - and, combined with his stumbling gait, translates vertigo into a horizontal register. Hence Reed's increasing tendency to characterise major streets as so many hyperbolic, yawning vanishing-points, as well as the intensification of rain and, in the third act, snow, to the point where all distinctions between the horizontal and vertical collapse, culminating with the surreal, aspatial finale in a snow-field fronting the docklands.