Carol Reed (1906-1976)
"Few would dispute that Carol Reed is one of the most important directors to have worked in British cinema; his masterpiece, The Third Man (1949), was voted the greatest British film of all time in a BFI poll. Yet the qualities which distinguish his films remain difficult to categorise and perhaps this accounts for the lack of academic attention paid to his work. In his study of the director, Peter William Evans points towards such recurring themes as father-son relationships, class tensions, his sympathetic depiction of female characters and a concern with innocence versus experience. Reed was also a supreme stylist, whose famous tilted shots seemed to match his often sideways view of a world of shifting values and moral uncertainty.
Reed was born on 30 December 1906 in Putney, South London. His mother was the mistress of the married actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Reed was one of six children she bore him. Tree maintained his second family in solidly middle-class comfort, but the unusual relationship with his inevitably distant father seems to have had some impact on Reed. After public school, he spent a brief period in America (at his mother’s insistence) working with his brother on a chicken farm, but then returned to Britain to take up a career as an actor. He eventually joined a theatre company formed by the thriller writer Edgar Wallace to stage some of his stories, working as an actor and stage manager. When Wallace became Chairman of British Lion in 1927, Reed joined him there as his assistant. With Wallace’s death in 1932 he jointed ATP at Ealing Studios and gradually worked his way up the ranks. He co-directed It Happened in Paris (1935) and then made his solo debut as director with Midshipman Easy (1936), a proficiently handled seafaring adventure.
Reed worked steadily as a director throughout the 1930s making a variety of mainly routine studio films. Most memorable among them is Bank Holiday (1938), which shows the growing influence of documentary realism in British cinema, the early screwball comedy Climbing High (1938) and A Girl Must Live (1939), which demonstrates Reed’s sympathetic handling of female stars, in this case Margaret Lockwood." [2]
"Reed’s early films are not remarkable, but few British films before World War II were. In the 1920s and 1930s British distributors were more interested in importing films from abroad, especially from America, than in encouraging film production at home. As a result British films were, with rare exceptions, bargain-basement imitations of Hollywood movies. In 1938, however, the British government stipulated that producers must allocate sufficient funds for the making of domestic films in order to allow an adequate amount of time for preproduction preparation, shooting, and the final shaping of each picture. Directors like Carol Reed took advantage of this increased support of British production to produce films which, though still modestly made by Hollywood standards, demonstrated the artistry of which British filmmakers were capable." [1]
"As the 1940s began, Reed cemented his growing reputation. His adaptation of A. J. Cronin’s The Stars Look Down (1939), the story of the rise of a miner’s son to become an MP, softens the author’s liberal political message and veers towards melodrama but is still a fine early example of socially aware British film-making. The much lighter Night Train to Munich (1940) is clearly indebted to Hitchcock’s thrillers of the 1930s, particularly The Lady Vanishes (1938), but has considerable style on its own account." [2]
"For the first time," Arthur Knight has written, "there were English pictures which spoke of the British character, British institutions - even social problems such as unemployment and nationalization - with unexpected frankness and awareness." Both The Stars Look Down and Night Train to Munich brought the director serious critical attention on both sides of the Atlantic.
"In 1942 Reed made a short educational piece for the War Office Film Unit called The New Lot (1943) which showed how a group of raw recruits could be moulded into a tough, loyal fighting unit. It was so popular that Reed was asked to expand it into a feature which became The Way Ahead (1944), an unvarnished depiction of army life. Filmed in a semi-documentary style, the film is full of scenes and characters which have become cliche´s of the war movie genre but which were fresh at the time. It is moving nonetheless and its bleak ending is surprisingly downbeat for a propaganda piece. Following this Reed worked with the American director Garson Kanin on the documentary The True Glory (1945) which uses footage shot by allied cameramen to produce a lucid, powerful depiction of the final days of the war. It was rewarded with an Academy Award. The experience gained by Reed in making wartime documentaries not only influenced his direction of The Way Ahead, but also was reflected in his post-war cinematic style, enabling him to develop further in films like Odd Man Out the strong sense of realism which had first appeared in The Stars Look Down." [1]
"Reed’s great period began with Odd Man Out (1947), an overpoweringly atmospheric account of the last days of a wounded IRA gunman played with melancholy charisma by James Mason. Reed adopts a highly stylised visual technique which perfectly suits the material and shifts the emphasis away from the politics of Ireland towards a story of love and salvation." [2]
"The documentary approach that Reed used to tell the story of Odd Man Out was one to which audiences were ready to respond. Wartime films, both documentary and fictional, had conditioned moviegoers in Britain and elsewhere to expect a greater degree of realism in post-war cinema, and Reed provided it. The more enterprising British producers believed that films should be made to appeal primarily to the home market rather than to the elusive American market. Yet the films that Carol Reed and some others were creating in the post-war years - films which were wholly British in character and situation - were the first such movies to win wide popularity in the United States. Among these, of course, was Odd Man Out, the first film which Reed both produced and directed, a factor which guaranteed him a greater degree of creative freedom than he had enjoyed before the war. For the first time, too, the theme that was to appear so often in Reed’s work was perceptible in Odd Man Out. In depicting for us in this and other films a hunted, lonely hero caught in the middle of a crisis usually not of his own making, Reed implies that man can achieve maturity and self-mastery only by accepting the challenges that life puts in his way and by struggling with them as best he can." [1]