'If the world should end tomorrow,' James Agee wrote in the Nation in 1947, 'this film would furnish one of the more appropriate epitaphs: a sad, magnificent summing-up of a night city.' A little earlier and in another paper he had called the film's second part 'half-baked', and what's interesting is that there is no real contradiction between the points of view. The movie in question is Odd Man Out (1947), reshown at this year's Edinburgh Festival as part of a tribute to Carol Reed in the year of his centenary (he died in 1976). The NFT recently screened a new print of The Fallen Idol (1948) and a good selection of Reed's other films for the same reason.

LRB 19 October 2006 | PDF Download