Odd Man Out · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Twenty minutes in, James Mason falls out of a moving car, and the film never puts him back in.

Before that fall, Odd Man Out is a thriller and it knows the grammar. The mill robbery is covered for clarity: high views over the city, level compositions, a geography you could draw from memory afterward. A man sees a situation, a man acts, the act changes the situation. Deleuze called this the movement-image, and its most confident version the large-form action-image, where an encompassing milieu presses on someone until he does the decisive thing. Reed can do that. He does it for one reel. Then Johnny is shot, kills a man in the struggle, loses his grip on the getaway car, and the machinery the first act so carefully assembled has nobody left to run on.

What follows is the reason to bring Deleuze to this film at all. He argued that somewhere after 1945 cinema produced a new kind of character: one who perceives a situation perfectly well and can no longer react to it adequately. He called it the crisis of the action-image and dated it to the Italians, to bombed streets and children who watch. Reed arrives at the same place in Belfast in the same window, from inside a genre picture, by a completely different road. He does not remove the plot. He wounds the protagonist so badly that the plot has no engine. That is Reed's specific invention here, and it is a producer-director's invention as much as an artist's: a managed gradient, calibrated so precisely that the audience follows the film out of realism without noticing the moment it left.

Johnny becomes what Deleuze names the seer. Not an agent, a watcher and an endurer. Mason plays it by subtraction, giving up mobility, then dialogue, then focus, then consciousness, until what is left is a face receiving things it cannot answer. That is the affection-image in its purest form, a feeling registered and never discharged into an act. Reed then does something almost impudent with it. He puts a painter in the story, Lukey, who wants to capture the look in a dying man's eyes, and who has therefore been trying, badly and all night, to make the thing the camera has been quietly making since the fall.

The sound proves it. Reed lays down a realist floor of trams, footsteps, children, rain, and then withdraws it, hollowing the ambience out so that one dripping tap or one clock is left holding the scene. Deleuze's term for a situation you can only look at and listen to, with no action available, is the pure optical and sound situation. This is what one sounds like. In the delirium passages voices come loose from the bodies that own them, and image and soundtrack stop confirming each other.

Structurally the film turns into stations. Johnny is passed hand to hand through self-contained encounters, and the dramatic questions all migrate to other people: will she shelter him, will he sell him, will he absolve him. Deleuze's dispersive situation, weakly linked characters and slackened causality, and his balade, the journey that transforms nothing. Johnny converts no one and arrives nowhere. The editorial architecture comes straight from Lang's M (1931), where a manhunt is sliced between police, underworld and gossips until the city becomes the pursuing apparatus. Fergus McDonell reuses the method for the opposite purpose. Lang cuts away to tighten the net; Reed cuts away to loosen the protagonist's hold on his own film. Ford's The Informer (1935) supplies the armature Reed both inherits and repudiates, one night's stations toward a death in a place of sanctuary, though Reed swaps the soundstage fog for real Belfast weather and Alwyn writes a pulse rather than a Steiner leitmotif, a pulse that thins and staggers as Johnny does. From Carné's Le Jour se lève (1939) comes the fatalism kept in the clock instead of the plot: eight hours, decided before the film starts.

Around the dying man, appetite. Shell the bird-fancier haggles over Johnny's value with a priest. Lukey wants the eyes. The barman wants him gone. Kathleen wants him alive or wants to die with him. Deleuze called this register naturalism, a world where the social surface gives way to drives, and where everything runs down a slope that only goes one way. The eight-hour clock is that slope written as a timetable.

Then the film breaks its own contract. Spilled beer bubbles up into faces; portraits in the studio animate into a jury and try him. These are not flashbacks, nothing you could date and place. Deleuze calls such free-running circuits dream-images, images with no anchor in any former present. The technical model is Murnau's The Last Laugh (1924), the unchained camera and its drunken-vision distortions, the world bending to a failing consciousness. What Reed adds is placement. Murnau's distortion decorates a domestic tragedy. Reed detonates his at the exact point where an audience most wants its suspense back, and gets away with it.

The city does the rest. Railings and lamp standards slice the frame into bars, faces are raked until the eye sockets go black, and the streets resolve into a graphic system of verticals with a dying man inside it. Deleuze's expressionism is exactly this, a non-organic life in things, light and shadow as a gradient the human gets caught in. Reed's canted angles, later mocked as a mannerism when Wyler offered to send him a spirit level, are here strictly motivated. They arrive with Johnny's disorientation and intensify with it.

And then snow. It whitens the city, flattens the depth, muffles the sound, and turns a place shot on location into an abstraction. This is the any-space-whatever in its empty form: not a nowhere, but a somewhere stripped of the coordinates action would need. The city the film refused to name has become a white field. On the quayside the plot resolves in seconds and the moral question resolves not at all. Two hours of asking what a city owes a dying man, answered by killing him without a verdict.

The honest complication is that the same withholding runs through the politics. The Organisation is never the IRA, the grievance is never stated, the enemy is never the British state, and Irish critics in particular have called that evasion rather than tact. It is worth saying plainly: the abstraction that lets this film become a time-image is the same abstraction that empties its politics. One gesture, two consequences.

That is also why it mattered to filmmaking. This was Rank money, a star, and a genre, and it shed its plot mid-flight without losing the room. Reed and Krasker proved that a real European city could be photographed as a psychological landscape and still be that city, which is the synthesis they carried to Vienna in The Third Man, and which French critics were at that moment assembling into a category called noir. Polanski has named it repeatedly; The Crying Game (1992) takes up the same gunman and the same question of what he is owed; a strand of Northern Irish cinema since has been one long argument with it.

Watch it again for one thing: the horizon. Note the reel where the camera stops agreeing with it, and ask whether you noticed at the time. Lukey wanted a picture of a man's eyes at the end. The film had already spent an hour giving you that, and never once told you what it saw.