Odd Man Out

Odd Man Out is a movie about an IRA man hiding out in the streets of Belfast after a heist gone wrong. In the film, the term “IRA” is never uttered—it’s always referred to as “the organization.” Come to think of it, I’m not sure the city is named as Belfast either. The only real indicator of the location, apart from the recognizable aerial shot of the harbor and the shipbuilding yard, is the wobbly but giveaway accent of the characters.

Odd Man Out was very compelling to me as a teenager, probably because I had been to Belfast a handful of times but had never seen a movie set there. This was in the early 1980s, before the spate of films inspired by the Troubles started to come out. Indeed, being from 1947, the film is set during a relative lull in Belfast community relations, when IRA operations were much more desperate and quixotic. The film represents the fugitive, Johnny McQueen, as wholly sympathetic and romantic in the extreme. For instance, all the boys in the neighborhood pretend to be Johnny, and even run up to the police, in character, to taunt them that he will never be caught.

Johnny is played by a young James Mason, who became known for playing compelling villains later in his career. Here he is a hero with villainous touches, and the object of a great deal of love and pity. Mason’s dark, dramatic beauty is enhanced in black and white, though as the film goes on it becomes somewhat marred by a gunshot wound and its associated exhaustion and delirium.

Watching it when I was young I was a bit surprised or even scandalized at how dreamy the IRA man in it was, and couldn’t tell if the filmmaker had done that on purpose. On watching it again, I can see that the whole film conspires to create this effect. Apart from the casting of Mason, you have Johnny’s short speech about how he wishes he could use legal means to fight for his cause, but he is compelled by circumstances to be an outlaw. He is also just plainly cast as a romantic lead, in that it is clear that the pretty girl in the story, played by Kathleen Ryan, is deeply in love with him. His deputy worships him and is willing to sacrifice himself to find Johnny and bring him to safety. Johnny’s flaw is that he underestimates the toll that being in prison took on him, but he bravely tries to lead the raid anyway.

The film is directed by Carol Reed, who also directed one of my favorite movies, The Third Man. I have been on a bit of a Reed streak lately. In addition to Odd Man Out, I also rewatched Night Train to Munich, which is an absurd but delightful lark, featuring a wisecracking Rex Harrison clinging to cable cars high in the Alps as part of its dramatic climax. Having watched Night Train, which is an anti-Nazi spy movie with a lot of Gestapo officers threatening the hero, it was striking how a lot of the imagery or themes overlapped in the two stories, only with the dour, menacing RUC officer taking on the role similar to the main Gestapo man. The whole framing of the story, during the war or just after it—when the characters are still using ration books—makes it hard not to draw some parallel between Johnny McQueen and resistance fighters of the era. At least in their cinematic contexts.

Johnny shot a man during the heist, and killed him, but felt tremendous guilt about it. He keeps asking his deputy and others whether he killed the poor fellow. Johnny is supposed to be the head of “the organization” so it did not strike me as terribly realistic that he would be so unused to killing. The original incarnation of the IRA was known for its targeted assassinations. One of Michael Collins’ signature acts was organizing a squad to kill the top intelligence officers working at Dublin Castle, the seat of British power in Ireland. They were also known for targeting Irishmen who served in the British-controlled police forces, seeing them as traitors. Perhaps there is a difference between killing known enemy agents and some schmuck who happened to get in the way at the robbery, but the hand-wringing didn’t seem quite true to the reality of the historical IRA. Although again, the story takes place at a time when the group was very scattered and disorganized. The army formed during the war for Irish independence in the early 1920s, but more or less disbanded at the end of the civil war, in 1923. It survived in a muted, low-level form, protesting the continuing problem of Partition, until it became a force again in 1969.

The movie remains a curiosity, in its choice of subject and the way it is portrayed. I was mostly interested in revisiting it for my own reasons, but I do wonder how it was received. Did Reed really view the members of that infamous organization as akin to resistance fighters? Or is that just ordinary dramatic license? Whatever the story behind the story, the fierce love for its main character still carries a great deal of force.