Odd Man Out (Two Cities Films, General Films, The Rank Organisation, 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, December 27) my husband Charles and I watched a Turner Classic Movies “Noir Alley” showing of the 1947 British film Odd Man Out, directed by (a man named) Carol Reed from a script by F. L. Green and former James Whale collaborator R. C. Sherriff based on Green’s 1945 novel about a young man named Johnny McQueen (James Mason) on the run from the police following a botched attempt to rob the payroll money from a mill. (This was still the time when a lot of employers literally paid their workers in cash.) The setting is northern Ireland, West Belfast to be specific, and in Green’s original novel the character was specified as a member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). But when Reed made the film he insisted that the story be changed so McQueen would merely be the local leader of something vaguely called “The Organization,” and likewise the setting would be fudged (though he actually shot it on location in Belfast and some of the city’s acknowledged landmarks figure prominently in it). Carol Reed has always seemed to me to be the sort of mediocre director who had a knack for ripping off the styles of his artistic betters and making great films by doing that. His early Night Train to Munich (1939) is an obvious ripoff of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938) – down to using the same leading lady, Margaret Lockwood. The Stars Look Down (1940) and Odd Man Out both owe a great deal to John Ford (though in fairness Reed made The Stars Look Down, his film about Welsh coal miners, a year before Ford made his, How Green Was My Valley). Reed’s best film, The Third Man (1950), owes a great deal to Orson Welles (and not only because Welles and Joseph Cotten are both in it), while his (undeserved) Academy Award winner, Oliver! (1968) owes a huge debt to David Lean, who’d done the same story – Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist – 20 years earlier. “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller argued that Reed’s run of three late-1940’s British films, Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol, and The Third Man, is the best run in movie history. Nonsense: both Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock had longer runs of great films than that.

Odd Man Out is basically your typical gangster-on-the-run story in which McQueen, having escaped from prison six months earlier and been hidden out in the apartment of his girlfriend Kathleen Sullivan (Kathleen Ryan) and her grandmother. Word comes down from “The Organization” that McQueen is to lead a robbery of a mill in order to finance the cause, but McQueen is disillusioned with the cycle of violence and he offers to step down and let his friend Dennis (Robert Beatty) take his place. Dennis wisely declines, and the robbery goes ahead, only during the course of the crime McQueen is tackled by an armed guard and is shot in the shoulder, while the guard is killed. Weakened by his injury, McQueen is unable to get into the getaway car, whose driver, Pat (Cyril Cusack), refuses to go back for him. Pat and another member of the gang, Nolan (Dan O’Herlihy in a role way too small for him), ultimately get killed in a shoot-out with police, and Dennis is arrested while trying to draw the cops away from McQueen. In the film’s best sequence, McQueen is found unconscious on the street after a truck has knocked him down and taken in by two women, Maureen (Ann Clery) and Maudie (Beryl Measor). The women give him first aid until they realize he’s been shot, whereupon they insist on either calling a doctor or taking him to a hospital. Realizing that either of those will result in his arrest, McQueen leaves and ultimately falls into the clutches of a drunken street person named Shell (F. J. McCormick). Shell has been pressed into service as the reluctant model of a crazy, alcoholic artist named Lukey (Robert Newton, who was inexplicably billed second and the only other actor besides Mason who got his credit above the title), who wants Shell to bring McQueen to his studio so he can paint his portrait. Meanwhile, Kathleen has contacted the local priest, Father Tom (W. G. Fay), who agrees to wait for McQueen. Shell says he knows where McQueen is – he left McQueen in a vacant lot, literally in an abandoned child’s bathtub – but demands money from Father Tom or he’ll turn McQueen in to the police and get the 1,000-pound reward the cops are offering for him. Unfortunately, by the time Shell goes round to fetch him McQueen has escaped again and is hanging out in a bar whose bartender is played by William Hartnell, the first Doctor on the long-running Doctor Who TV series. Lukey also shows up at the bar and picks up McQueen to take him back to the studio and paint him.

Ultimately, after a medical-school dropout named Tober (Elwyn Brook-Jones) tries to tend to McQueen’s wound, McQueen flees again and ends up cornered by police on a waterfront dock. Kathleen meets him there and pulls out McQueen’s gun. She fires it twice and the police gun them both down, effectively committing what is now called “suicide by cop.” The final shot is of Father Tom pulling a blanket over both their bodies, which Charles questioned because under the laws of the Roman Catholic Church suicide victims are not considered to have died in the good graces of God (which explains why he doesn’t give them the last rites). Odd Man Out is a good movie but it’s also the sort of film that seems to be trying too hard. Certainly Reed and his cinematographer, Robert Krasker (who later shot The Third Man as well), create an utterly convincing noir atmosphere that makes Odd Man Out look as nightmarish as anything Fritz Lang and his crews came up with in the studios of Neubabelsberg or Hollywood. But the movie does suffer from a lack of coherence, especially in the second half – the film lost me once Robert Newton’s silly, clichéd crazy-artist character entered – and for once (as with John Ford’s The Searchers) the original critics, who praised the film’s first half but criticized its second, were right and the later lionizers and hagiographers were wrong. One of the film’s big weaknesses is that James Mason is off-screen during all too much of the second half; instead of sympathizing with his plight, we start having Where’s Waldo? moments and wondering, “Where’s McQueen?” Amazingly, though Mason was a veteran actor in British films (he was born on May 15, 1909, which means he was already in his late 30’s when he made this) and had made some quite good movies, including a 1942 thriller called The Night Has Eyes (reissued under the tacky title Terror House) of which I have fond memories from a public-domain VHS tape, it was Odd Man Out that broke his international career and led him to Hollywood. Kathleen Ryan also came to the U.S. to have a go, but unlike Mason she didn’t make it, though she’s quite good in this, her first film. It’s true she’s unable to make her final sacrifice believable – there’s a great scene in which her grandmother warns her not to stay involved with an IRA gunman but to leave him, let him go and live a normal life, but Kathleen refuses her grandma’s good-sense advice – but that’s more the fault of F. L. Green than hers. Ultimately Odd Man Out is a film that contains some great scenes but tries to do too much, though I wonder if the taciturn attitudes of the townspeople who quietly draw their curtains and lock their doors when both police and gangsters pass them influenced Fred Zinnemann and Carl Foreman when they made High Noon five years later.