Apollo Reed

In Britain's post-war period, there was perhaps  no other film director more esteemed than Carol Reed (1906-1976). For three consecutive years the British Film Academy singled out his films as their finest indigenous product. Odd Man Out in 1947, The Fallen Idol from 1948 and more notably The Third Man in 1949. Reed was knighted in the year 1952, an unusual honor for a director working exclusively in the cinema. His adaptation of  F.L. Green's  eponymous 1945 novel Odd Man Out was utterly disparate from The Stars Look Down (1939), as Reed was seemingly uncommitted to Cronin's hero; the fate of Johnny McQueen (James Mason) the Northern Irish revolutionary wounded during a robbery to secure funds for the IRA, interested the director deeply. This is reflected in the film's visual thematic, camera angles vertiginous and masterful shadow effects that induce a baroque universe of unsettled perception, fear and nightmare. (And in fact Reed's signature tilted camera angles were so prevalent in this film and its successors that American helmsman William Wyler jokingly gave him a spirit level to put on top of his cameras). Johnny totters about helplessly as he embarks on his fateful journey -dripping his blood from air raid shelter to house, to horse cab to builder's yard, to public house and inevitably to death.

With The Fallen Idol, Reed would commence a fruitful collaboration with the distinguished writer Graham Greene, who as a film critic had sang paeans
about Reed's work in the 1930's, his first of which he remained without receiving credit as director of It Happened In Paris (1935) a script that was actually penned by John Huston. Most of the tandem efforts of Reed and Greene revealed an affinity for exotic and eccentric locations - Schreyvogelgasse, Vienna in The Third Man. Cuba's capital in Our Man in Havana (1959). The action of The Fallen Idol however, takes place in London. Phillipe, a privileged child (Bobby Henrey) lives in an unidentified foreign embassy and idol worships its butler Baines, portrayed impeccably by Ralph Richardson, the chap has been seriously telling porkies, having never actually been to Africa ,one of his false claims as part of the setting of his far-fetched tales of derring-do that quickly sour when his wife is found in rigor mortis. Here again, Reed utilizes distorted camera angles and one-of-a-kind spatial compositions to convey the disordered perceptions of the main character - the odd one out, alienated by a world exclusively built for adults and a world implausible that he should comprehend. Greene's own script, from his story The Basement Room, is snappy and piquant.

Orson Welles says ' So Sewer Me' The Third Man (1949)

The hero of The Third Man, which was filmed from an original Greene script centers on another odd man out - a hack pulp writer, Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), who stumbles naively around a post-war Vienna  - criss-crossed with zones and black markets, as he attempts to uncover the truth regarding the demise of his friend slash meal ticket, Harry Lime (Orson Welles). The expedition does not go without incident - for it brings a fair share of dilemmas to Martin , and for one, he discovers Lime is in all actuality a murderous racketeer and the news of his death indeed spurious as Lime is very much alive and somewhat well as he slinks about the city's doorways and sewers. Once again Reed's camera tilts almost uncontrollably, fashioning strange landscapes from the bombed Vienna exteriors; Anton Karas' lingering zither music and Orson Welles' appearances, tantalizingly delayed until the last third of the film, are equally as haunting as they are enigmatic.

No Woman Is An Island. (Kerima, Outcast of the Islands,1951)

But for all the film's distinction there now seems something a mite strained about Reed's direction, the effort that went into the visual effects is all too apparent to the trained eye. Perhaps Reed himself sensed this at the time - for his subsequent films look unequivocally staid by comparison, though the adventurous Outcast of the Islands (1951) bristles with tension and is generated less by camera tricks than the fevered tempo of acting and editing. Outcast of the Islands whisked him away from Graham Greene and now into the world of Joseph Cotten, another writer who held a passion for making his characters' lives as morally ambiguous as possible. The outcast -yes, make that one more odd man - is Peter Willems (Trevor Howard), an arch-sensualist who is given control of an East Indian river village by his protector Captain Lingard (Ralph Richardson) only to fall prey to tribal jealousies and the attractions of the native girl Alissa (Kerima). Reed documents his decline into complete depravity with dogged skill..

Havana Laugh? It's Alec Guinness and Maureen O'Hara in Reed's late entry Our Man In Havana (1959)

Reed made nearly a dozen films before his death but none reached the level of this post-war quartet.

Consider yourself won - Reed gets the gold for Oliver Twist (1968)

Our Man in Havana, albeit reunited him with Graham Greene who supplied a script from his own novel about yet another muddled innocent wading into deep water - meet Jim Wormold, an unsuccessful expatriate businessman cum British spy portrayed Alec Guinness, who sends his superiors drawings of imaginary missiles that closely and cheekily resemble the very vacuum cleaners he sells in his Cuban shop. The one complete success of Reed's last years was Oliver (1968). Reed filmed Lionel Bart's winning musical about Oliver Twist with bracing brio. His objective style of directing, with its strong emphasis on editing, may have been past its sell by date come the end of the Sixties, when it was the more free-wheeling styles that were in vogue, yet it proved quintessential for the subject at hand: Bart's songs and routines were put across with all their excitement and timeless charm. And at last Reed won another award - the Oscar for Best Director.