Carol Reed through the fog

Why is Carol Reed such a misty and blurred figure even for most film enthusiasts --not to mention the general public? The reasons are worth exploring in some depth, since not all of them are merely circumstantial, but have to do with his own personality and even with the nature of his own filmmaking.

Reed is not --like so many others-- merely a once celebrated director whose popularity eventually declined, or who lost touch with the changing tastes of his audience, or with the interests of the film industry, to become a has-been, a director no longer called upon to direct major films or films appropriate to his faculties and inclinations, until, in retirement and ultimately dead, he was nearly forgotten by fans, critics, and --more surprisingly-- even by film historians, whose attention would focus on later, more artistically prominent, or more commercially successful filmmakers.

While all this was true to some extent of Sir Carol Reed, additional factors came into play long before his career slowed to a halting pace, and he found himself unable to make the films he wanted to, and even abandoned a number of projects to which he had dedicated much time, interest and effort, such as the next-to-last remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, whose very problematical direction fell ultimately to Lewis Milestone.

It is as if there were something in his career, or his personality, which facilitated or hastened his oblivion, something that we might detect even in the period of his greatest celebrity. It is true that his style was never particularly pronounced, nor even especially noteworthy --including his perennial and somewhat exaggerated taste for tilted camera shots, which fatigues even those (few, I would imagine) who defended the practice or found it original or meaningful, or at the very least an effective means of conveying disquiet or imbalance. Nor was Reed alone in this, so it doesn't even amount to a trademark or an individual signature, but appears rather to have been some sort of fetish, a superstitious rite that he indulged in following the success of The Third Man. The fact is that he used the device continually from about 1944 to 1963.

At first glance, Reed was "the man without qualities", without a hint of mystery or the picturesque, without the colour or the mystical aura that enveloped his more or less contemporary U.S. directors (Nicholas Ray, Sam Fuller, Joseph H. Lewis, Budd Boetticher), and even European-born (Edgar G. Ulmer, Robert Siodmak, Andre de Toth, Douglas Sirk), and his fellow Briton (Michael Powell, David Lean). And while he must have had his own secrets, passions, and obsessions, Reed managed to keep them out of his pictures and his low-keyed public image, so only quite recent research has brought them to light. Indeed, it takes the closest scrutiny to find directors of his period (Jacques Tourneur, Gordon Douglas, Richard Quine) that appear quite so commonplace, so merely like office clerks or bank employees, and by no means resembling what one has come to expect from film people or artists in general. Reed might have made a good spy, since nobody would have suspected him of such an activity. He might have been taken for a rather dull, slightly absent-minded history professor, permanently lost in his books, papers and documents, anchored in a remote backwater of the Middle Ages --indeed, such men were often recruited by the British, or the Soviet, secret service, and at times by both. Thus perhaps we should not be surprised by his affinity and enduring complicity with Graham Greene, or his skill at making films that dealt, sometimes only obliquely, with secret, undercover, or underground activities, or scenes taking place at the margins or in the catacombs of modern society, which illustrated very graphically the subterranean labyrinth that can be reached through the Viennese sewers of his most celebrated picture.

Even during his fleeting period of relative celebrity Reed maintained what is called a "low profile" with regard to the news media, and was loath to make public statements or grant interviews. And when he did speak it was usually in monosyllables and he confined himself to stating the obvious, eschewing anything that might have been original, interesting, or revealing. He had few pretensions, and his modesty was so explicit and excessive that it seemed false --many people thought it a studied pose. He tended to agree with whatever the interviewer said, which could be interpreted as due to a lack of ideas and opinions, or to simple indifference to what others thought of him.

And although he did sometimes repeat himself --it is obvious that in The Man Between, for instance, he used in Berlin the master stroke already seen in Vienna in The Third Man, and that Reed was not alone in trying to cash in on his good understanding with the touchy and constantly complaining Graham Greene, even as late as 1959 with Our Man in Havana --it is plain that he didn't like to repeat himself, and tried to avoid being pigeonholed in a single genre, or identified with a certain type of film. Notwithstanding this healthy search for variety and even eclecticism, however, there was a certain monotony to all his films, which were expressed in a relatively academic idiom. He doubtless believed it to be functional and flexible. And so it may have been, but --perhaps because of Reed's own nature-- the films failed to convey a sense of amplitude, of unlimited horizons, of energy, of the impulse to experiment, as did those of Howard Hawks, William A. Wellman, Michael Powell, say, or even those of Michael Curtiz.

With a handful of partial exceptions, Reed's films are rather grey, muted, and almost uniform, their "high" moments few and far between. This may explain why even his best work tends to slip from the memory rather than embed itself there permanently. The exceptions would include some shots from The Third Man, insistently though mistakenly attributed to inspiration in the work of Orson Welles, but even this film, which was Reed's only claim to real fame for many years, and especially in retrospect, is remembered more for Anton Karas' zither that for Reed's shots --dense and painterly though they were-- or even for the ghostly, errant, dissatisfied characters that wander erratically through the story.

Though Reed was no doubt a fine "director of actors", none of the stars who played in his films won fame for their performances, though the list includes such varied and distinguished personalities as James Mason, Margaret Lockwood, Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles, Ralph Richardson, Trevor Howard, William Holden, Wendy Hiller, Sophia Loren, Alec Guiness, James Donald, and Robert Newton. This might be explained by the fact that Reed himself started out as an actor, and submitted his casts to the harshest discipline, brooking no excesses. During rehearsals, shooting, and editing, Reed sought a homogeneous and sober tone; this is why the hysterical and glum Laurence Harvey of The Running Man, the exasperated and conventional Anthony Quinn of Flap, or the predictable and laboured Topol of Follow Me, made in Reed's final period, appear so unpleasantly out of place.

Although tension runs high --even to the point of anguish-- in most Reed films, and they are full of tremendous moral conflicts, his ideas may have been too complex, subtle and ambiguous to allow plain and well-defined conclusions to be drawn. He detested simplification and moralistic messages, so he rarely made emphatic statements and was unusually tolerant --to the point, in films made during the war, of showing a surprising respect for the enemy, never underestimating their intelligence or stooping to caricature them. Neither did he set himself up as omniscient or almighty judge, which has the effect of keeping the spectator on edge, undecided, uncertain, which I find stimulating and productive, though discomfiting and even disagreeable for the lazier members of the audience, who are not happy to be placed in Reed's swamps of moral uncertainty.

As is suggested in some of the personal testimonies collected in this volume, Reed was genuinely modest and loath to blow his own horn. He did not regard himself as an auteur of his works. At the same time, however, he had quite definite ideas, and would not submit to instructions or indications that he considered absurd, lacking the force of conviction, incoherent, contradictory, prematurely impatient, or insufficiently justified.

But neither does he appear to have wasted much energy in struggling against these interferences from his producers or collaborators, and he certainly engaged in no open conflicts with power, which he most likely would have lost. We shall see how he ignored --or attended only very superficially to-- the detailed observations and demands made in co-producer David O. Selznick's legendarily voluminous memorandums during the preparation and shooting of The Third Man, without bothering to argue with Selznick or his people. "We'll think about this," or "We'll look into this" was the stock answer made by Reed or Greene, who relied on distance or the mediation of Alexander Korda to protect them. No doubt they did briefly consider Selznick's suggestions, but then almost always discarded them, and did things as they had originally planned. This technique of passive resistance usually succeeded in wearing down the adversary, as did that of delaying the changes until there was neither time nor money left to implement them. After all, they reasoned, it was Reed and Greene, but mostly Reed, who had to make the films, and not their supervisors.

However, Reed lacked that heroic impulse that leads some directors and other artists to boldly defend their control of the work and its integrity or purity, even to the point of destroying themselves in combat and failing --most of the time-- to prevail, as was sometimes the case of Nicholas Ray, Orson Welles and so many others, including Erich von Stroheim in an earlier day and Sam Peckinpah in a later one. Reed was more diplomatic, and this strategy was probably more effective, since he usually managed to do things his way, making only minor or token concessions.

At all events, it is easy enough to understand why Reed was mainly ignored by the new French film critics that emerged in the 1950s and by the British ones that succeeded them in the 1960s. Indeed, the conservatism he seemed to espouse in his few public statements would have pitted him directly against these critical movements. Reed defended the craft-industry concept of film, as opposed to the more personal --when not openly autobiographical-- films favoured by the new critics, whose views remain little challenged even today.

This certainly explained why Reed and his works have remained so long in mothballs, with the sole exception of The Third Man, his only film to enjoy instant --and, thanks to television, enduring-- success, and which rivals the mythic status of such classics as Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, Gilda and a very few others, including even fewer European films.

But to have made The Third Man, sharing (reasonably) the credit with Graham Greene, and (less reasonably) with Orson Welles, is not a sufficient achievement to ensure enduring fame for the director.

If Reed's work has largely escaped the attention of today's younger film enthusiasts, it is because of the weak, disappointing and rather impersonal films made in the last stage of his career, most of them neither genuinely American, nor typically Hollywood, nor plainly British, and which --probably for that very reason-- remain in circulation today. Meanwhile it is much harder to find the earlier, British films which better exemplify Reed's concepts of filmmaking. When they think of him at all, younger film buffs think of Reed as just another Hollywood hack, lacking the slightest interest, and attribute the quality of The Third Man to Welles, to simple luck, to history --it emerged during the anguished existential soul-searching of the post-war period, and reflected it well-- or to the combination of a good story by Greene, a good cast, a competent technical crew, and unusual locations. But this list of possible explanations of The Third Man's success rarely includes the dramatic or narrative talent of its director, Carol Reed.

This is not to say that all his early films are excellent, nor that his purely British period was especially dazzling, in the same sense that it would be a baseless simplification to say that Reed's career --or at least his creative inspiration-- was effectively ended with the inflation of his reputation after the world-wide success of The Third Man, and the slow disappearance of British cinema under the weight of American productions after World War II (and that of its remains on BBC-Television as of the 1960s).

In my view, the dividing line, if any exists, is neither straight nor sharply drawn, since some of Reed's best films were made long after The Third Man (e.g. Outcast of the Islands, 1951), or long before it (Bank Holiday, 1938), or nearly adjacent to it (The Way Ahead, 1944; Odd Man Out, 1946). I also believe that one of his last films (Oliver!, 1968) found him in the best of form, and --even more improbably-- the series of movies he made in the 1950s includes some quite respectable and stimulating or at least revealing ones, some of them based on Graham Greene's stories, like Our Man in Havana (1959), but others not, such as The Key (1958), adapted from a novel by Jan de Hartog, which were as good as the more successful ones he made at the end of the 1940s (The Fallen Idol, 1948) or the 1930s (The Stars Look Down, 1939).

To me, this suggests that Reed's work should not be considered chronologically, nor subjectively (his age), nor objectively (the period). It is or should be clear that in the films which he made with the least interference, Reed showed himself to be an excellent and attentive narrator, able to convey --from within and without-- anguish, uncertainty, and even fear: Odd Man Out, The Third Man and Outcast of the Islands are good examples, and also The Man Between, Trapeze and The Key. I have already mentioned his extraordinary ability and skill, until very late in his career, as a director of actors, even when --as was often his practice, and that of other British directors-- he cast them in roles that were very different from those they usually played, and which contrasted sharply with their public image.

However, as several writers and critics have noted, Carol Reed's most prominent trait was his extraordinary ability to create atmospheres --so sadly lacking from so many of today's productions. These atmospheres were physical and natural, but also more intangible, and sometimes deliberately misleading. They involved temperature (heat, damp, cold), the moral climate of a time or place --what the French call l’esprit du lieu (the spirit of a place --a city, a neighbourhood, a building), and what the Germans call zeitgeist, or a sense of the period. All this allows us to date with precision even his apparently less realistic films, those that were more abstract or stylised, closer to the expressionist spirit that certainly informed his art, in combination --as is often the case of British films-- with the documentary tradition. It is the synthesis of those two basic tendencies that have engendered good films throughout the history of the medium and that lend enduring value to many of Reed's films. But it also explains why they have been largely forgotten and often misunderstood, for the films apply two different (and not as irreconcilable as some critics maintain) approaches to achieve the same objective: to represent and interpret reality on a reduced scale, in a synthesised and concentrated form, but also including defining traits of the environment.

At bottom, the most direct and immediate antecedent of Carol Reed's work is not the almost synchronous American film noir, with which some of his most famous works have been compared, but rather the ambiguously or confusedly named French "poetic realism" of the 1930s, as best represented in its more realistic, prosaic and sometimes sordid dimensions by Julien Duvivier, and in its more poetic, romantic and stylised form by the works of the excellent Marcel Carné, such as Quai des Brumes and others made before the war and in the early post-war period, and which shared with Reed's work not only stylistic features but also a rather gloomy, disenchanted and sceptical view of the world, bordering on misanthropy at the moments of greatest despair.

Withal, Carol Reed and his works today surely deserve more critical attention that they have so far been accorded. The Reed films so long beyond our reach should be revisited and rediscovered by unprejudiced eyes that are able to see what is in them, without exaggerating their qualities or seeking hidden intentions that they probably lacked. Reed's work is also interesting insofar as it shows the risk involved in the "internationalisation" of films, which often means depriving the stories and characters of their roots, and which, in the hands of a director so sensitive to settings and atmospheres, affects the way these stories are told. In a way the second part of Reed's career stands comparison --though the direction was reversed-- to some of those major American filmmakers who were obliged by circumstance to wander aimlessly around Europe, their fates hanging on the changing fortunes of their financiers. From his solid British dock he occasionally set out --sometimes following his characters-- to explore new territories, and not towed by multinational or merely dislocated production companies seeking lower taxes and cheaper labour. In this, the most genuine part of his career, we find sufficient evidence of his talent as a filmmaker and storyteller to conclude that The Third Man was anything but a fluke; rather, it was a felicitous combination of a good story and the right director, making it one of the few European films that could compete successfully with American movies on their own turf, without imitating them or renouncing its European nature.

En “Carol Reed”, edición a cargo de Valeria Ciompi y Miguel Marías. San Sebastián-Madrid : Festival Internacional de Cine-Filmoteca Española, septiembre del 2000.