Tag: Carol Reed

The Fallen Idol (1948)

Brilliant thriller about how hard the world is for a child to understand

Director: Carol Reed

Cast: Ralph Richardson (Baines), Michèle Morgan (Julie), Sonia Dresdel (Mrs Baines), Bobby Henrey (Philippe), Denis O’Dea (Chief Inspector Crowe), Jack Hawkins (Detective Amos), Walter Fitzgerald (Dr Fenton), Dandy Nichols (Mrs Patterson), Geoffrey Keen (Detective Inspector Davis), Bernard Lee (Inspector Hart), Dora Bryan (Rose), Karel Stepanek (First Secretary), Torin Thatcher (Constable)

We’ve all had heroes we worship haven’t we? Few hero worships burn as brightly as a child’s. Eight-year-old Philippe (Bobby Henrey), son of a foreign ambassador in London, is awe-struck by the embassies English butler Baines (Ralph Richardson), a kind, decent man with a twinkle in his eye who enjoys spinning stories for Phil about his exciting life in India. The highlight of Phil’s day is spending time in Baines’ parlour. For Baines though, his highlights are the snatched moments of release from his domineering, unloving wife (a masterfully tough-to-like Sonia Dresdel) that he spends with embassy secretary Julie (Michèle Morgan).

The affair is obvious to us in seconds. But Phil – from whose perspective we see large amounts (but, crucially, not all) of the film play-out – is of course oblivious, readily accepting Baines awkward assurance Julie is just his niece. The Fallen Idol – the middle film in Reed’s astonishingly high-quality run of films that includes Odd Man Out and The Third Man – is a brilliantly tense, very moving story of how adrift children feel in the adult world, how easily they misinterpret signals and misread social cues. Superbly filmed, with a wonderful script by Graham Greene (from his own novel) it’s a masterclass in how the simplest situation can lead to the most intense drama.

It revolves around a fatal trap for Baines. Believing his wife is away for the weekend (she has in fact concealed herself in the embassy mansion), Baines treats himself to a day and night with Julie. Discovered, the confrontation leads to Mrs Baines dead at the bottom of the stairs. The argument is partially witnessed by Phil – but crucially, only glimpses of it as he runs down the exterior fire escape, peering in through windows as he goes – but in full by the viewer. It’s clearly a terrible accident, taking place after Baines had left. But Phil is convinced he has witnessed a murder – and so passionate is his hero worship of Baines (and loathing of Mrs Baines), he decides to do everything he can to protect the butler.

The genius of Reed’s The Fallen Idol is that we are always know more than any of the characters. Just as we can tell immediately from witnessing Baines and Julie’s whispered, Brief Encounter-ish meeting in a London coffee shop that they are in the midst of a passionate affair, so we also know much faster than any character that Mrs Baines is still in the house and that her death is a clumsy accident. We can also see, in ways Phil cannot, that his desperate lies only undermine Baines honest version of events. We know all the details well ahead of the police, watching them misinterpret clues and behaviour in the worst possible light. The entire film shows how damning circumstances and coincidences can fold up into a vice-like trap from which there is almost no escape.

The Fallen Idol is a film awash with lies. In many ways it’s a heartbreaking reveal of how quickly the compromises and selfishness of the adult world corrupts the child’s. At the heart of these lies is Baines himself. The role is beautifully played by Ralph Richardson, utilising his eccentric cuddliness to exceptional effect, but also perfectly capturing the selfishness, weakness and cowardice of Baines. Because Baines is a liar – not only to his wife, but also to Julie (he spectacularly lacks the guts to ask his wife for a divorce, despite what he tells Julie) and, walking Phil back after he has crashed Baines’ tea-time meeting with Julie, urgently instructs him to lie if he is ever asked about what happened that afternoon. Baines doubles down on his duplicity by using the unwitting Phil as a shield to cover a zoo-trip date with Julie, and even his adventure stories to Phil are all slightly self-aggrandizing tall tales.

One of the toughest things about The Fallen Idol is that hero-worship is a confused one-way street, especially when children are involved. Baines is fond of Phil but often treats him with distracted affection out-of-kilter with the earnest, devoted adoration Phil pours on him. This devotion from Phil is so great, even his belief that his hero is a murderer makes no impact on him. Having taken his idol’s lessons to heart, about what to do when questioned about anything to do with Julie, Phil lies and lies to the investigating officers, corrupting himself (he believes, after all, he is helping a killer) while also making the innocent Baines seem guiltier-and-guiltier with every word.

Carol Reed draws a superbly natural performance from Bobby Henrey, in a performance utterly lacking in childish, mannered acting tricks. It’s a hugely natural performance, over-flowing with innocence making Phil a character we end up deeply caring for. The early half of the film throws us perfectly into the excited world of a child with a whole mansion to run around in, cuddling his pet snake close to his chest. Reed also brilliantly captures how a moment of trauma confuses and terrifies an innocent into not knowing what action to take. Fleeing the house barefoot – clearly terrified and heartbroken – immediately after the death, Phil is petrified when he encounters a policeman not because he is intimidated, but because he fears inadvertently betraying his idol.

Reed superbly captures the desperate vulnerability of children, the nightmare of not having your voice listened to as adults talk over and around you. The Fallen Idol (with its careful use of disjointed angles and God-like, wide-angle shots from above) has a superb sense of the horror of being caught in a situation you neither fully understand or can influence. It’s echoed perfectly by Baines’ increasingly defensive panic as each denial falls on all-too-obviously deaf ears. Phil also misinterprets almost everything he is told in the film, right up to when the sympathetic Julie (a lovely, warm performance from Michèle Morgan) begs him that only the truth can help Baines.

The Fallen Idol spices this up with superb moments of comedy. Dora Bryan has a delicious cameo as a ‘lady of the night’, called upon to by the flummoxed policemen at the station Phil has fled to, to try and draw some words out of the stubbornly silent child – and who can only fall back on the cliches of her profession (‘Can I take you home dearie?’). An Inspector (a lovely cameo from Bernard Lee) called in to translate in the embassy is begged by the first secretary to drop his inept schoolboy French. A tense interrogation of Baines is interrupted when a pedantic embassy staffer insists he must be allowed to check the clocks in the room (Reed wittily shows the characters revolving, clockwork like, impatiently on the spot in the background while this interminable check goes on).

But the great strength of The Fallen Idol is how it captures the joyful innocence of childhood and the Kafkaesque confusion the adult world can have on a child. Poor Phil never really understands anything that goes on (although the film ends with a sweet irony of Phil being the only person who perhaps understands a vital ‘clue’ only to be completely ignored) while we are always in complete understanding. Reed’s direction is faultless, both from his work with actors to his masterful use of camerawork and editing to really capture the confusing, unreadable adult-world from a child’s perspective. It’s a masterful, gripping, heart-rending film – a small scale classic that perfectly mixes tension and wit.

Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)

Epic retelling that sticks with the same melodrama and nearly destroyed Brando’s career

Director: Lewis Milestone (Carol Reed)

Cast: Marlon Brando (Lt. Fletcher Christian), Trevor Howard (Captain William Bligh), Richard Harris (John Mills), Hugh Griffith (Alexander Smith), Richard Haydn (William Brown), Tarita Teriipaia (Princess Maimiti), Matahiarii Tama (Chief Hitihiti), Percy Herbert (Matthew Quintal), Duncan Lamont (John Williams), Gordon Jackson (Edward Birkett), Chips Rafferty (Michael Byrne), Noel Purcell (William McCoy), Tim Seely (Midshipman Ned Young), Henry Daniell (Admiral)

After the success of Ben-Hur, MGM thought it had cracked the mystery of making those cash-registers go ring-a-ding: massive historical pictures, with scale and run-time dialled up to “epic”. Mutiny on the Bounty was one of the most famous stories of all time and they’d had signed up Marlon Brando, universally seen as the greatest actor alive. It couldn’t go wrong, could it? Months of shooting and a disastrous box-office release later (despite a MGM campaign that landed this a Best Picture nomination), and Mutiny on the Bounty effectively destroyed Brando’s career for the next ten years and became a by-word for star excess.

Brando played mutineer Fletcher Christian – but in a manner completely different from Clark Gable (who, Brando disparagingly stated, only played himself minus the moustache). Brando’s Christian would be British and then-some: posh, foppish, a gentleman torn between the rules of society and those of fair play. Bligh – played with a constant sneer by Trevor Howard – would follow in the footsteps of Laughton, but Brando wanted to make something more serious, more historical. Less of a blood-and-thunder naval drama and more a character study that would give a fair crack of the whip (so to speak) to the Tahitian natives the mutineers lived among.

The film we ended up with though is no more historically accurate than the 1935 Best Picture winner. Part of the film’s disastrous reception might well be that this epic tells more-or-less exactly the same salacious story of a devilish sadist scowling as he whips men to death (far from the truth of the real Bligh, a poor leader but not a monster) until his noble number two steps up (the real Christian was a spoilt weakling) but in what feels like twice the time with half the fun. If you want to watch this version of the Bounty story, why would you want to choose this one? (We’d have to wait until the 1984 version for a more fair-handed telling.)

Not that Mutiny on the Bounty is as terrible as its reputation suggests. It touches – particularly in its thoughtful post-mutiny coda on Pitcairn island – on an interesting character study of the mixed motivations of Christian, filled with regrets and self-pitying sulking. It wants to explore where the balance lies between what is right by the letter of the law and by its spirit. Nothing Bligh does in the film is wrong as such, but his relish and zeal in doing it are. Christian isn’t a conventional hero, but a smirking, foppish character prone to snide remarks and affecting an air of disconnected duty for large chunks of the film. If the film had allowed Bligh more sympathy, rather than the two-dimensional monster he’s portrayed as here, it might have made for an interesting character clash.

Instead, it tends to be slow, self-important and pompous, not helped by Brando’s indulgent performance which sacrifices drama for portentousness. For all the film offers a cartoonish villain, it’s resolutely unfun and deathly serious. Shot with a professional, disengaged widescreen flatness by Milestone (called in from decades of retirement as a “safe-pair of hands”, after the sacking of Carol Reed), it’s uninspired and mistakes size for visual interest. The ship, in particular, is shot with a wide-angled spaciousness which feels completely wrong for a location supposed to be ripe with claustrophobic tension.

The drama attempts to make up for this with its parade of lashings, keel-haulings and bodies (or obvious dummies) tumbling to their death from the rigging. Trevor Howard delivers exactly what’s asked fork here, sneering and constantly in the wrong. It’s one of the film’s failings that it leans into psychological complexity in some places, while most of its events and its second lead are presented with cartoonish silliness. Its location shooting in Tahiti looks great (although the all-too-obvious intercutting of this with scenes on sound stages, sometimes from one cut to another, jars) but a widescreen image of glistening sea would look gorgeous in even the most workmanlike hands.

Perhaps the film is, at times, a chore because it all too clearly was for many involved. Reports of Mutiny on the Bounty have regularly focused on its disastrous making, with directors fired, location shoots awash with dysentery, shooting months over schedule. Above all, Brando rewriting the film on the fly, muscling a disinterested Milestone aside to direct certain scenes. Not a surprise that the studio decided all the blame would be dropped on him not them (they were also stung by the contract they gave him, at $5k a day overtime, Brando’s perfectionism becoming one of the main factors of the film going months over schedule), leaving him virtually unemployable for a decade.

But is that fair? Brando arguably become the awkward, unlikeable, misunderstood Bligh with the cast and crew as the mutineers, all of them intent on a voyage of mutual self-destruction. Put simply, this was a clash between Brando’s immersive, deep-dive acting style and Old Hollywood. To Brando “professional” meant something very different to the “hit-your-marks-say-your-words” attitude of Milestone and the crew: it meant searching over time for the heart of a character. The sort of psychological depth Brando was aiming for was just anathema to many of those he was working with, coming across as the unprofessional self-indulgence of a spoilt star. Combine that with Brando’s stand-offish shyness and professional selfishness and you had a recipe for disaster.

Severed from any director he respected (he made it all too clear he considered Milestone a hack studio Yes-Man) and with no-one having either the power or inclination to restrain him, Brando threw every idea he had at the screen, no matter how awful. So we got Christian with a ludicrous, giggle-inducing accent, a performance stuffed with foppish eccentric touches (and awful costume choices) that aims at thoughtful re-invention but comes across as a camp, bizarre mess. The tragic thing is Brando is clearly passionate about the project, putting more thought and commitment into this performance than he ever offered in barely-bothered turns in films like Sayonara.

Brando was also working with a group of Reed-recruited actors with no sympathy for him. This group of macho British and Irish heavy-drinkers (Hugh Griffith, in a crucial role, frequently disappears for no reason as his alcoholism eventually became such a burden he was fired mid-shoot) had no sympathy for the fey Brando or his acting style. Richard Harris’ loathing of his co-star – who responded to their open dislike with petty on-set power-plays, only making the whole problem grow – in particular is all too-clear. Brando looks most comfortable working with the Tahitian actors (he had long been a passionate anti-racist campaigner) and later married Tarita Teriipaia. It’s one of the few times where he makes Christian feel fully human rather than a mixed bag of conflicting actorly tricks.

Mutiny on the Bounty has its moments: unfortunately it’s all the wrong ones. For a film that wanted to be a more serious, historical exploration of the mutiny, its best parts revolve around Howard’s lip-smacking villainy, combined with flashes of its on-location shooting. Problem is, that’s not dissimilar from what we got in the 1935 original – and really you’d just be better off watching that.

Oliver! (1968)

Mark Lester asks for More. You may not share his sentiments in the Oscar winning Oliver!

Director: Carol Reed

Cast: Ron Moody (Fagin), Mark Lester (Oliver Twist), Jack Wild (The Artful Dodger), Oliver Reed (Bill Sikes), Shani Wallis (Nancy), Harry Secombe (Mr Bumble), Joseph O’Conor (Mr Brownlow), Hugh Griffith (Magistrate), Peggy Mount (Mrs Bumble), Leonard Rossiter (Mr Sowerberry), Hylda Baker (Mrs Sowerberry), Kenneth Cranham (Noah Claypool), Megs Jenkins (Mrs Bedwin)

1968. The Vietnam War gets worse. The My Lai Massacre is a low-point in America’s global reputation. MLK is assassinated. Student protests rip through campuses, culminating in Chicago riots at the Democratic convention. RFK is assassinated. In the UK, Enoch Powell talks about “Rivers of Blood”. A flu pandemic sweeps the world. The USSR ends the “Prague Spring” with tanks. It was a year of horrific global turmoil. Perhaps it’s not a surprise the Oscars chose as Best Picture something as blandly comfortable and utterly disconnected from all this mayhem as Oliver! A personality-free re-tread of a successful stage musical, with a few good tunes bolstering a lobotomised adaptation of Dickens’ novel, Oliver! is so coated with sugar it must have helped the medicine of 1968 go down.

Young Oliver (Mark Lester with his singing voice dubbed) is an angelic orphan, thrown out of the workhouse for asking for “more” (Never before has such an event occurred), eventually escaping to London (Where is Love eh?). There he finds the Big Smoke to be nothing less than a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Invited by pickpocket The Artful Dodger (Jack Wild) to consider himself part of the family, he’s soon learning how to pick a pocket or two from Fagin (Ron Moody). It’s not all fun and games though: violent criminal Bill Sikes (Oliver Reed) is a wildcard, although his devoted girlfriend Nancy (Shani Wallis), the sort of girl the boys will do anything for, remains loyal to Bill for as long as he needs her. But there’s a secret in Oliver’s past – who are his parents?

Carol Reed could once make a claim for being the greatest director in the world. You couldn’t make a case for that based on this cosily chocolate-box, unimaginative trudge through a musical that has little other than a couple of catchy tunes to really recommend it in the first place. The real MVP here is Onna White, whose choreography is very impressive. White takes everyday acts and, with a little bit of jazz and a dollop of musicality, turns them into dance movements. It gives the dance numbers a heightened reality that kind of works and provides nearly everything worth looking at it in the film. Reed certainly leaves her to it, carefully setting the camera up with simple wide and medium shots to capture as much of it as possible.

And you could argue that’s his job. But he brings nothing to the other parts of the production. Of course, Lionel Bart’s musical is a much lighter affair than Dickens’ original (although, in actual fact, this is much more of a musical remake of Lean’s Oliver Twist, making many identical cuts and sharing nearly all the same dialogue), but you’d think the director who gave us Odd Man Out and The Third Man could give some drama and character to London’s underbelly. Not a jot. They have the same muted technicolour cleanliness of everything else, and any hint of ruthlessness, criminality or moral conundrums are well and truly left at the door. What we get is a world where everyone – apart from Bill – is fundamentally nice and decent, and rapacious old men using children as criminals is basically not a lot different from running an after-school club.

It isn’t helped that Oliver!, like Bart’s stage original, has a weak book that offers little light or shade for its characters other than to typecast them into simplified “goodies and baddies”. Reed and the film either can’t or won’t stretch this much further – although the film does rearrange some events of the original production to give a bit more motivational heft to actions and introduce Bill earlier to at least add a bit more tension. The film is as quickly bored with the angelic Oliver as the original is – fair enough since he’s a tediously saintly chap – with Mark Lester alternating between looking winsome and shocked at the company he finds himself amongst.

Nothing can interrupt the overflowing “niceness” of what we are seeing. Ron Moody’s Fagin had been honed from performing it on stage so often (and he is very good). But his Fagin is a cuddly uncle, the sort of grown-up scamp you would invite over for a drink, only keeping an eye on the silverware when you did. This is, let’s not forget, a bloke who colludes in murder (though the film reduces his responsibility), kidnapping, grooms kids for a life of crime and willingly lets them die for him. Not a whiff of this is allowed onto the screen. The Artful Dodger (played with a cheeky but tellingly amoral charm by Jack Wild, who tragically never hit these heights again) is given more light and shade than Fagin.

Like the musical, the film downplays the abusive relationship at its heart. Nancy is little more than a walking embodiment of the cliched “tart with a heart” trope, and the film adaptation chooses to praise her for not just sticking with her abuser, but slavishly devoting herself to him. In fact, beyond being casually kind to a child once in a while, this devotion is pretty much Nancy’s entire personality – and the film approves of it. This isn’t a dark picture of a violent man victimising a young woman, folks, it’s love! See, there’s a ballad about it and everything!

It’s a family drama so her murder takes place off screen (just her death spasm legs are seen), but you’d like to think the film could have taken a few moments to put a bit of light and shade on just why this character feels the way she does and does the things she does. In fact, the film is quite dependent on Oliver Reed, the only actor in it who dares to touch some sort of psychological depth – it’s quite telling that, even though he was a famed drunk, he’s the only member of the cast to have had any success after the film was released.

Instead, this is a great big, colourful, empty pantomime of a musical, devoid of character and (outside of its choreography) inspiration. It’s a great big explosion of tasteful sets, mugging actors, pretty colours, prancing and the odd catchy tune. It’s got no idea what the original novel was about at all, and no interest in even touching some of the themes of poverty and criminality Dickens was aiming at. Reed directs the entire thing with the indifference of a gun-for-hire.

Its syrupy sweetness and hammering tweeness leaves you punch-drunk rather than sugar-rushed. Oliver is such an insipid fella you’ll be delighted when he shuts up and sits in the background for most of the second half. It clumsily unveils a mystery and then drifts towards a conclusion that lacks any real drama. It studiously avoids anything that could remotely stretch the viewer. It’s trying so hard to charm you and hug you, it comes across like a lecherous stranger offering you sweets. Oliver! wasn’t even the best musical of 1968, let alone the best film. But in a year when the world was going to hell in a handcart, perhaps a kid-friendly fable bending over backwards to charm and reassure you was what the world needed. Doesn’t mean I need to stomach it now.

Odd Man Out (1947)

James Mason is wounded and on the run in Odd Man Out

Director: Carol Reed

Cast: James Mason (Johnny McQueen), Kathleen Ryan (Kathleen Sullivan), Robert Newton (Lukey), Robert Beatty (Dennis), Cyril Cusack (Pat), FJ McCormick (Shell), William Hartnell (Fencie), Fay Compton (Rosie), Denis O’Dea (Inspector), WG Fay (Father Tom), Maureen Delaney (Theresa O’Brien), Dan O’Herlihy (Nolan), Elwyn Brook-Jones (Tober)

Is it set in Belfast, or is it set in Purgatory? We follow in the footsteps of Johnny McQueen (James Mason), a leader of “the organisation” (the IRA by another name), on the run in an Irish city with a bullet buried in him. With the police looking to bring him to book, Johnny has to find his way to safety – easier said than done when pain and blood-loss keeps you moving between consciousness and collapse. Is this Johnny’s dying fever dream? It’s a tempting interpretation of Carol Reed’s stunning Odd Man Out (the first of a hat trick of masterpieces from Reed over three years, the others being The Fallen Idol and The Third Man).

It’s a perfect marriage of styles. It opens with a sense of documentary realism that would do Rossellini proud, the camera flying over its unnamed Irish city. As we dive into the house where Johnny and his cell are hiding out, planning a robbery for much-needed funds, the film tips into a marriage of noir and classic gangster film. After the disastrous robbery, where Johnny shoots a man dead in a scuffle, the film becomes more and more an impressionistic series of vignettes as an at-times delirious Johnny stumbles from encounter to encounter, meeting a host of people who help or hinder him, many of whom want him for their own ends (from reward to bizarre artistic inspiration). All this is intermixed with his own increasingly tenuous grip on reality, some scenes floating and soaring with Johnny’s own fantasies and visions as the bullet in him slowly drains his lifeforce.

As Reed’s film increasingly moves into a world that is a few degrees less real than our own, you could argue that perhaps Johnny was dead from the start. That this is his own journey through some sort of Dante-inspired purgatory. His own odyssey, where he will encounter some who want to save him and others who want to damn him. Reed brilliantly helps us share Johnny’s vulnerability by taking the film ever more off-balance. From Johnny’s visions of the past in the air raid shelter where he takes shelter we spiral down into a surreal bombed out house and an ending that has the sniff of Greek tragedy.

No wonder Johnny feels disconcerted, as this is a rag-tag city with its own rules. Half under construction, half well-established, where the streets are a mix of cars and horse-drawn cabs, Johnny’s journey takes him from dotty housewives to tramps to saviour priests and Dickensian artists. As his fever takes hold, so does the bizarreness of his settings, until he finds himself in an abandoned grand house leaking snow from outside, being painted by a drunken artist who wants to capture the moment of death on his canvas. It’s a million miles from the forensic reality of the robbery that the film started with. Yet it never feels out of place.

A large part of that is because of how brilliantly the film invests us in Johnny’s journey – with Reed’s inspired camera-work and story-telling pulling us into his experience. James Mason spends large chunks of the film in silence, but his performance is extraordinary. A man who seems partly aware that he’s dying, guiltily wanting to know if the man he shot died. Who even from the start seems to have lost his purpose, doubting if violence can bring the results “the organisation” wants, dazzled by sunlight after years in prison, who leads his cell through habit rather than inspiration. Mason’s brilliance here is capturing the very essence of suffering humanity, a confused and frightened man who struggles to understand what is happening around him. Buffeted by events, he’s sympathetic because he never feels in control.

Partly that’s because death feels like its always been waiting for Johnny. You can see it from the start, as he sits in his hide out wondering what its all been for. Kathleen (well played by an impressionable Kathleen Ryan) can’t get death off her mind as she talks about finding and saving Johnny or dying with him. Sympathetic priest Father Tom (a devout WG Fay) just wants to have the chance to save his soul. There is a sense of inevitability about the film – helped by Mason’s crumbling weakness – that destruction is coming and nothing can avoid it.

Reed’s film also has a brilliant sense of the compromises and shady questions of right-and-wrong. Johnny is a murderer and a terrorist – even if he also is a man plagued with doubt. Kathleen is a romantic and a fanatic. Hotel owner Theresa plays both ends against the middle. The coppers will do their duty, but they don’t seem vindictive, just determined to do what they must. There are no clear moral answers in this film, everyone has shades of grey.

It all combines together into one of the most inventive, dynamic and compelling British films of the 1940s by a director who was entering a purple patch where he could claim to be the greatest director in the world. This is a perfect fusion of styles – part realist, part impressionist – that puts you into a cold reality before tipping us into a poetic never-world where the boundary between life and death seems blurred. With a superb performance from Mason (and the rest of the cast), this is still one of the all-time greats.

The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965)

Rex Harrison and Charlton Heston debate the creation of art in The Agony and Ecstasy

Director: Carol Reed

Cast: Charlton Heston (Michelangelo Bounarroti), Rex Harrison (Pope Julius II), Diane Cilento (Contessina Antonia Romola de’Medici), Harry Andrews (Donato Bramante), Alberto Lupo (Duke of Urbino), Adolfo Celi (Giovanni de’Medici), Venantino Vanentini (Paris De Grassis), John Stacey (Giulano da Sangallo)

Call a film The Agony and the Ecstasy and you are tempting fate with the critics. Make your recurring dialogue phrase “When will you make an end?” and you are practically writing the negative headlines for them. Your enjoyment of The Agony and the Ecstasy is pretty going to be pretty much directly linked to your level of interest in Renaissance art, the Sistine Chapel and stodgy Hollywood epics. Don’t care for any of those? This probably isn’t the film for you. For me, I love the first two – and I have a terrible weak spot for the third. I know (trust me, I know) films like this aren’t that good really, but they go about their epic work with such earnestness that they always suck me in.

The film, an adaptation of a doorstop novel by Irving Stone, tells the story of Pope Julius II (Rex Harrison) commissioning Michelangelo (Charlton Heston) to paint the Sistine Chapel. It’s a job which Julius expects will be done and dusted in a couple of months: instead it takes almost four years (and that’s just the ceiling, the film doesn’t even cover the artist moving on to The Last Judgement!). Rejecting the original concept, Michelangelo decides to turn fresco painting on its head: and so one of the greatest masterpieces of all time is born.

The Agony and the Ecstasy lost a bucket load of money (despite this is hoovered up five Oscar nominations, most of which focused on its strengths, above all, it’s 1:1 recreation of the Sistine Chapel which is progressively covered in paint as the film progresses). It more often than not tips somewhere between documentary and reverence of God, the Church, the Artist or all three at once. The first 12 minutes of the film is literally a documentary, a run-down of the artist’s career with mid-Atlantic voice-over and reverential visual slide-show of the artist’s greatest hits.

Once the action starts, all too often the film heads into “men in tights” territory, a stilted, personality-free Hollywood version of the Renaissance, all primary colours and dubbed European actors. Directing, with a smooth emptiness, is Carol Reed. Remember when Reed made films like The Third Man and Odd Man Out? How could the man who made films as original and dynamic as those close out his career making such middle-of-the-road fare as this and Oscar-winner Oliver? Reed delivers by-the-numbers. From swelling chords of Alex North’s well-judged score at our first sight of the interior of the (unpainted) Sistine chapel to the pristine pictorial pleasantry of the marble quarry Michelangelo retreats to, there is not a single unique or interesting shot in the film.

The closest the film gets to visual dynamism is the half-way point as Michelangelo heads to the mountains for inspiration, to see the clouds form themselves into (what we recognise as) the Creation fresco from the chapel. But then perhaps Reed reckoned he couldn’t bring us anything as visually striking as the ceiling (and to be fair who can?). So, the film doesn’t compete.

Instead it settles down into demonstrating the mechanics of how the ceiling is completed. While you could get a good dig in here that we see a real time painting of the ceiling, in fact I felt this demonstration of how you go about transferring a design to a ceiling was fascinating. Certainly, you can see why it takes a burden on Michelangelo. The film builds some nominal drama about whether it will ever be finished: but since it’s clear Julius (who at times is a bit of a “why I oughta…” boss, frustrated but amused by a protégé’s shenanigans) and Michelangelo (tempestuous of course, as artists are) have no intention of not finishing it, it’s pretty manufactured. But it doesn’t matter because this is really a story of the glory of fine art – and the burdens of its creation. And on that score it’s very successful and, for all its earnestness, very effective.

Charlton Heston gives a fine performance as the great artist. While there is no hint of Michelangelo’s probable sexual flexibility – Heston claims to have done his research and decided there was no way any of that was going on in the artist’s life – we do get a lot of his prickly bitterness (his surviving correspondence is a never ending stream of bitching about money and barely a mention of art theory, a sign if ever I saw one that great artist’s need to balance the books like the rest of us). Heston’s grandness may seem at time like he is as carved out of marble as the subject’s work (after all this is the actor cast as Moses based on his physical similarity to Michelangelo’s carving), but he does convince.

Rex Harrison has the juicier part as the war-like Pope, the Prince of both the Church and Realpolitik. Harrison famously declined to grow the beard that Julius was famed for, but he captures the brusque playfulness of this man who remodelled the Papacy as a political force. His scenes carry energy and wit in a way most of the rest of the film lacks.

Overall though the film, I am well aware, is (ironically) as slow as watching paint dry. But yet, it pushes my buttons and I rather like it. Again, it’s probably a bias coming into it. And I forgive it a lot for a beautifully judged and played scene where Julius and Michelangelo study the creation fresco and its meanings for faith. It’s wonderfully written and played and carries a profound spiritual intellect. This is when the film comes to life – it’s gives serious space to proper discussions on questions of art and faith, which is often rewarding.

Sure, it sits within a film that is often dry and old-fashioned. But when it zeroes in on the painting itself: how it came about, its inspiration and its meaning – it carries a real impact. It’s a flawed film: but I find myself with a very soft spot for it.

The Third Man (1949)

Orson Welles is the dark heart of The Third Man

Director: Carol Reed

Cast: Joseph Cotton (Holly Martins), Alida Valli (Anna Schmidt), Orson Welles (Harry Lime), Trevor Howard (Major Calloway), Paul Hörbiger (Karl the porter), Ernst Deustch (“Baron” Kurtz), Erich Ponto (Dr Winkel), Siegried Breuer (Anna), Bernard Lee (Sergeant Paine),Wilfrid Hyde-White (Crabbin)

It’s regularly held up as one of the cornerstones of classic 1940s film-making – and it has frequently won polls of the Greatest British Films of all time. Does The Third Man live up to expectations? No it excels them. I doubt there has been a film more perfectly assembled than this, one where all the component parts click together to make one perfect whole. No matter how many times you see The Third Man, it weaves its spell every time.

In immediate post-war Vienna, the city is divided into four zones, each run by a different great power (the UK, US, France and USSR). The black market is rife between the zones. Into this city arrives pulp Western writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton), here to visit his old school friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) – only to find on arriving that Lime died in a traffic accident, with British policeman Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) insisting that he was a black marketeer. Holly can’t believe Harry was a crook, and decides to investigate himself – on the way falling in love with Harry’s girlfriend Anna (Alida Valli) and finding that nobody’s story on what happened to Harry matches up. Could the accident actually be a murder?

Carol Reed’s atmospheric film is beautifully, perhaps flawlessly directed – so well made that for years there were fevered efforts to assign its brilliance to Welles himself. Which was studiously unfair to Reed, a director at the top of his game in the 40s. The Third Man was the crowning glory of a run of superbly stylish thrillers that matched thought provoking themes with striking film-making. The film is soaked in the atmosphere of post-war Vienna, a city half shelled out of existence. The film was shot on location, and Reed’s camera captures the “bombed about a bit” shambles of the city, its long shadows, cobbled streets and mysterious alleys.

The Third Man’s filming style also plays into this truly distinctive look. Working with (Oscar-winning) cinematographer Robert Krasker, the film is shot with a luscious almost German impressionistic style, with murky shadows and noirish lighting. Reed uses huge numbers of Dutch Angles to constantly present both this shattered city, and it mysterious story, from disconcerting angles. This visually represents the uncertainty and mystery that drip from every scene, making Vienna look like some sort of sinking ship, disappearing into a mire of crime and guilt. Reed’s camera fills the edges of the frames with tramps, beggars, the dispossessed and the plain scared – a brilliant snapshot of post-war Europe unsure about the future and ripe for exploitation.

The film looks simply stunning, with Reed’s visuals throwing up images that have stuck in film heritage, from fingers poking through a sewer grill, to the iconic entrance of Harry Lime itself (possibly the most famous entry ever). Shadows loom with gigantic proportions over the streets. A final sewer chase seems to take place in a nightmare world of water, false turns and foreboding architecture. And that final shot! Sublime cinema, the stillest shot in the film, and also a superb capturing of the film’s themes of loyalty, duty and betrayal.

The film was scripted by Graham Greene, and occupies a wonderful corner of Greene-land. His original concept was for Holly (or Rollo in the original script) and Harry to be British public schoolboys – a plan rejected when Hollywood co-funding came to call – but it did allow Holly to be transformed into a naïve American, lost in the cold realities of post-war Europe. Holly believes in the world of black and white, and writes stories where good triumphs over evil in the Wild West. He’s adrift in a Europe where everyone lies habitually, morality is flexible, and nothing is as it seems.

Holly is bound by old chains of loyalty to Harry – but how far does that loyalty stretch? What price personal loyalty when confronted with the impact of what a person has done? Joseph Cotton’s performance is pitch perfect, a middle-ranker who has orbited his whole life around brighter stars like Harry. How one-way was the relationship? Can Holly ever think for himself?

And is the right thing to do to walk away or try and correct the wrongs done by another?This divide is shown in the relationship between Cotton’s Holly and Alidi Valli’s sensational turn as Harry’s ex-girlfriend. A woman who has seen the harshness of the world, and been through a war-torn life that Holly would struggle to even comprehend, she’s a woman to whom personal loyalty trumps all things. Should you be loyal to the man you know, your experience of him – or do you have a higher loyalty that trumps that? Anna is firmly of the belief that she knows all that she needs to know of Harry and she needs to learn no more. It’s the sort of European post-war compromise that Holly can’t adapt to, the ideas of morality becoming mired in shades of grey.

It’s a world he struggles to adapt to, but is a cold hard reality for Trevor Howard’s Major Calloway – a superb performance of cool reserve that hides a strong sense of justice. Howard’s wry half-smile and control is perfect for the film, and his disgust at the actions of black marketeers is subtly and brilliantly conveyed by both the actor and Reed’s restrained direction – a visit to a children’s ward full of victims of Lime’s penicillin, is notable for leaving everything to our imagination and communicating another loss by showing a Teddy bear being dropped into a box.

And the cause of all this suffering? Why it’s none other than Harry Lime himself. No film ever captured Orson Welles’ impish charm as well as this, his shy grin and air of an enfant terrible turned terrible are brilliantly captured in the boyishly young but demonic Harry. A Mephistopheles placed on earth to tempt men like Holly, Lime argues what do a few people (or dots) here and there really matter in the long run? After all governments sacrifice them all the time – look at Vienna! – why shouldn’t we? What’s the problem? Lime grins and casually outlines a demonic view of the world, casually uses a cheap historical justification or two, and then saunters off never suspecting that he could lose the argument. Like Welles himself, he has all the glamour and magnetism that we could never have, and to live a few moments in his shadow, as Holly and Anna do, is to live a lifetime.

So Holly has to make a choice – the friend he knew, or the strangers he has seen harmed. The film charts the slow passage to making this hard choice, presenting us with a man who refuses to believe his friend could be anything other than the victim of persecution, to the man who is destined to turn him in. With the framework of Carol Reed’s superb filmmaking, it’s still an absolute treat.

And finally, The Third Man is blessed with perhaps the most perfect film score of all time. Recorded by Anton Karas – literally discovered playing the zither on the streets of Vienna – the score is jaunty, lyrical, schoolboyish even but can switch subtly to something quite disconcerting. It perfectly captures the schoolboy bravado of Holly and the childish lack of morals of Lime. As a match with the bombed out Vienna and its rundown, cynical citizens, it’s perfect. Like all things with The Third Man, it just works better than you could ever have hoped.