William Hartnell – Movie Musings

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.

Rachel Roberts and Richard Harris excel in brutal kitchen-sink drama This Sporting Life

Director: Lindsay Anderson

Cast: Richard Harris (Frank Machin), Rachel Roberts (Margaret Hammond), Alan Badel (Weaver), William Hartnell (“Dad” Johnson), Colin Blakely (Maurice Braithwaite), Arthur Lowe (Slomer), Vanda Godsell (Mrs Weaver), Jack Watson (Lennox), Harry Markham (Wade), George Sewell (Jeff), Leonard Rossiter (Phillips), Anne Cunningham (Judith)

The British New Wave of the early 1960s embraced working-class stories. They centred on chippy, confident, crowd-pleasing working-class young men (it was always men) from regional towns, doing blue collar work, thumbing their nose at the establishment and fighting to find their own way. This Sporting Life takes a similar route – but its central character, Frank Machin, is a furious, resentful and selfish man, who seems hellbent on destroying everything he touches. Unlike Arthur Seaton or Billy Fisher, he’s hard to like – and the film hits as hard as scrum of rugby players.

Frank Machin (Richard Harris) is a miner turned professional rugby player – not that he has any love for the game (“I only enjoy it if I get paid for it!” he contemptuously states). Machin is an articulate brute of a man, a pugilistic whirligig of resentments, barely expressed or understood desires, and a deep-rooted and chronic insecurity that cries out for love while pushing it away. He’s in love with his landlady, widowed mother of two young children Margaret Hammond (Rachael Roberts). They begin an affair of sorts – but it can barely survive her trauma and Machlin’s self-destructive rage.

Lindsay Anderson’s films are notable for their anger and bitter satire, so it’s no surprise he directed the least crowd-pleasing, angriest angry-young-man film of all – or that This Sporting Life killed the genre. The film is a series of hits, aimed far and wide, from the deference of the players to the owners who treat the clubs like playthings (the “amateur fair play” British attitudes to sport from the patronising owners gets a kicking), to the hypocritical judgemental attitudes of the working class. Even its romantic story features two characters so unable to engage with or understand their feelings that they only really seem able to communicate fully when raging at each other.

Anderson’s new-wave, kitchen sink aesthetic creates a film that feels like a series of battles. From Machlin moving in local clubs to visiting the home of creepy closeted club owner Weaver (a smooth and unsettlingly cruel Alan Badel), whether rebuffing the advances of Weaver’s wife or at a Christmas party, he always seems ready for violence. The rugby matches are filmed like mud covered fights, with players piling into each other like sledgehammers. Even the “romantic” (and I use that word advisedly) scenes between Roberts and Harris feel like conflicts (they frequently tip into nerve-shreddingly raw emotional outbursts).

Anderson’s film takes everything you expect from the Saturday Night and Sunday Morning expectations and amps up the danger, anger and tension. Machlin barrels through scenes, conversations and relationships in the same way he charges through the rugby pitch. The whole film is a sharp warning of the danger of unrestrained masculinity, pushing all softer emotions to one side. Machlin wants so desperately to be a man that everything must be a battle, at all times displaying his most manly qualities. The tragedy is that you can tell there is a far more sensitive and intriguing personality below the surface.

All this comes together in Richard Harris’ searing performance in the lead role. His career break – he won the Best Actor award at Cannes and was nominated for an Oscar – Harris was possibly never better. He’s a brooding force of nature in this film, utterly convincing as a man who bottles up his feelings until it is way too late. He hits out at everything, but you feel he is really running scared from the vulnerability in his own personality. With children, Machlin is tender and gentle, but with adults he is unable to express his feelings. His emotions for Margaret are based around suggestions of a need for a mother figure, sexual desire – and a desire for an answer to the emptiness he feels in himself. Harris is like an Irish Brando here, a marvellous, emotional, dangerous, brutal figure.

Rachel Roberts (also Oscar-nominated) is just as good, giving another extraordinary performance (to match the similarish role she played in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) as Margaret. Grieving her husband, terrified of commitment, aware of her own position, as incapable in her own way of expressing her emotions and feelings as Machlin is, Margaret is as much a damaged and combative character. Roberts’ performance suggests years of disappointment and struggle behind the eyes, and she has a rawness and humane anguish in her scenes with Harris that sear the eyeballs. The scenes between these two are difficult to watch but engrossing.

The film is stuffed with excellent performances. William Hartnell is heartbreakingly tragic as the closeted talent scout who spots Machlin, only to be dropped by the new star. Colin Blakely is excellent as Machlin’s more grounded and engaging teammate. Vanda Godsell is the face of female corruption as Weaver’s sexually possessive wife. Arthur Lowe (who went on to work with Anderson several times) is very good as a stuffy but shrewd board member. All of this is beautifully filmed in black and white, with an urgency mixed with flashes of impressionistic grimness.

Anderson’s film, though, is primarily a working-class tragedy, about a man unable (until far too late) to really understand what he wants. Why is this? Because of failings in himself, but also failings in his upbringing, where qualities of self-understanding and expression are not encouraged, where pressure is placed on men to be men, where class and stuffy attitudes look to stamp out any real sense of self-knowledge. It’s an angry young man film that is truly, really angry. No wonder it flopped at the box office. But no wonder it lasts in many ways better than other films from this genre. It feels like a film that wants to say something, that has an urgent message. And it has at two extraordinary performances.