The League of Austen Artists: James Mason: The audacious Odd Man Out turns Britain’s biggest star into furniture in his own film BY MIKE D'ANGELO (AV CLUB)

Monday, February 18, 2013

James Mason: The audacious Odd Man Out turns Britain’s biggest star into furniture in his own film BY MIKE D'ANGELO (AV CLUB)

In Scenic Routes, Mike D’Angelo looks at key movie scenes, explaining how they work and what they mean.

Imagine that you’re at the multiplex to see your favorite actor’s latest star vehicle. Doesn’t really matter who it is, but for the purposes of this exercise, let’s stipulate that it’s somebody very famous, a take-charge personality. Liam Neeson would be perfect, but it could be Matt Damon, Denzel Washington, Daniel Day-Lewis, whoever. Anyway, he’s playing the leader of a gang or a criminal organization of some kind, and early scenes show him planning a big heist. Maybe he and his confederates have noble motives for the robbery. Not important. What is important is that you came to see Neeson (or Damon, or whoever) do his badass thing… but his character is shot during the holdup, badly wounded, abandoned by the rest of the gang. He’s bleeding so much, he can barely stay conscious. And while he’s physically present for much of what follows, it’s only in the way that, say, Tim Roth is physically present for the first half of Reservoir Dogs. The actual movie is about the various people who come in contact with him, virtually none of whom are played by similarly well-known actors.

Sound plausible? That’s the gist of Carol Reed’s 1947 classic Odd Man Out, which stars James Mason—the most popular British actor for four years running at the time of its release—as IRA leader Johnny McQueen. (His group is called “The Organization” throughout, but it’s Northern Ireland, so who are we kidding?) Mason gets shot 14 minutes into the two-hour picture, and is only intermittently awake and coherent from that point forward; the drama revolves entirely around random citizens, mostly embodied by stage actors Reed drafted from the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. It’s a portrait of a community, exploring the ambivalence of people who sympathize with Mason’s cause, but not necessarily with his methods. In its finest, thorniest scene, a couple of middle-aged women gradually realize that the “accident victim” they’ve taken in won’t likely garner them awards for Samaritans Of The Year.