THREE BY CAROL REED (1906-1976)

Shortly after the end of World War II, the British director Carol Reed offered the actor James Mason a part in a new film.  Mason had hitherto built his career on parts, often romantic leads, in historical meringues, all costumes and with plots of whipped egg-whites.  He later recalled that he was looking to make a better sort of picture, and perhaps go on to a career in Hollywood.  Making better films meant working with directors of the first rank, of whom he thought there might be five or six in Britain at the time.  He cited David Lean, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Reed, Anthony Asquith (Pygmalion, co-directed with Leslie Howard, 1938 and Cottage to Let, 1941), and Sidney Gilliat (The Rake's Progress, 1943, and Waterloo Road, 1945), as well as "an annual fluke." 
     This casual assessment had Reed just about right for 1946.  He had directed nearly twenty films, and was best known for The Stars Look Down (1940), a critical success but commercial dud in England, although it did well enough in America; Night Train to Munich (1940), which earned money but never entirely evaded the accusation that it was basically a knockoff of Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938); and The Young Mr. Pitt (1942), another money-maker, but a strictly orthodox biopic out of the 1930s mold, except that the eponymous character was played by Robert Donat instead of George Arliss (who played Cardinal Richelieu, Mayer and Nathan Rothschild, the Duke of Wellington, Disraeli, and a handful of others) or Paul Muni (Louis Pasteur, Emile Zola, Benito Juarez). 
     Reed and Mason made that film, Odd Man Out (1947).  It was by far the best work of Reed's career to that point (a reviewer for the London's Sunday Chronicle got a little enthusiastic and hailed it as "the best picture of all time"), and he followed it with The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949), two even better films.  It was work that made him a candidate for Britain's outstanding filmmaker, although Lean (Blithe Spirit and Brief Encounter, 1945; Great Expectations, 1946; Oliver Twist, 1948) and Powell and Pressburger (The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, 1943), I Know Where I'm Going (1945),Stairway to Heaven (1946) and The Red Shoes (1948) would have given him some competition.  While plenty has been written about The Third Man, I thought it might be worth my time, and I hope yours, to look at all three films, individually and as a group, and see what makes them tick. 
     After The Third Man, Reed made some decent films, such as Outcast of the Islands (1950), Our Man in Havana (1959--no film can be irredeemable in which Noël Coward delivers the line, "A bit bumpy over the Azores"), and even won an Oscar in 1968 for Oliver!, which was bit like giving John Ford Oscars for The Informer, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green was my Valley, and The Quiet Man but nothing for his westerns.  Reed died in 1976, four years after his last film, never having come within hailing distance of those three from the '40s.  What, I wonder, was the source of Reed's magic in those immediate postwar years.

Learning the Trade
Reed was born at the end of 1906, the illegitimate son of a famous actor and theatrical impresario, Sir Herbert Tree.  Tree's surname at birth was Beerbohm; he was a cousin of the writer, critic, and caricaturist Max Beerbohm, but changed his name the better to correspond with his considerable height and to suggest what he saw as his towering stance in his profession.  Tree was not only a force to contend with on the stage, but in the bedroom as well.  Although married, he compiled an impressive list of conquests, one of whom, May Pinney, he set up in housekeeping in a London suburb.  May, who bore him six children, including his son Carol, changed her name to Reed, because "I was but a broken reed at the foot of a mighty tree."  (For family history and other biographical materials, I have relied heavily on Nicholas Wapshott, Carol Reed: A Biography, New York, 1994). 
     Tree never unambiguously acknowledged his parentage of his son.  Even so, Carol Reed followed his father  into the theater, at something of a distance, acting in small parts, doing backstage jobs, stage managing, ultimately directing road companies and, by 1929, London productions of everything from the dramatic ephemera of the time to Shakespeare.  He had his first and only on-screen film acting role in 1929, worked as an assistant director on fifteen films between 1929 and 1935, and then got his first directing assignment.  In other words, Reed served a rather long apprenticeship in directing, learning the business from the ground up.  He was not and did not pretend to be the genius with the blinding vision.  Reed was a craftsman who had learned stage blocking and dialogue directing, lighting and lenses, and how to keep to budget by laboring on a series of mostly forgettable projects but extracting valuable lessons along the way. 
     He gained enough stature in the late 1930s that there were the predictable come-hithers from Hollywood, but Reed resisted.  In British film at the time, there were numerous obstacles to a thoughtful director making a good film, including a stifling censorship which all but eliminated any ending that sent the audience out even vaguely depressed or discouraged.  But in America, Reed knew, most directors were just studio mechanics, people with highly defined jobs, like a key grip or a sound mixer.  At home, Reed could count on influential involvement in every step of filmmaking from scripting through casting and art direction and shooting to editing.  Only that way, he understood, would he ever take any satisfaction from making films.

Odd Man Out
F.L. Green was a British novelist who had moved to Belfast years before the war, and in 1945 he published Odd Man Out.  It told the story of the last twelve hours in the life John Aloysius Murtah, the head of the Belfast Organization (read: IRA), who has broken out of jail and stayed in hiding for months, planning with his men to rob the payroll office of a large textile mill in order to finance Organization activities.  But the robbery goes bad, Johnny kills a cashier and is wounded himself, then is separated from his men.  While the Irish Royal Constabulary (i.e. the British-controlled police) hunt him down and his loss of blood progressively weakens him, he is sought by the Organization and by Agnes, the woman who has helped hide him and in the process fallen in love with him.  Johnny briefly enters the lives of people sympathetic to his cause, others frightened to be near him but willing to help, and a few hoping to collect the reward on his head or otherwise wanting something from him.  There is no particular political agenda in the novel.  A crime has been committed and Green's assumption is that it will and must be paid for.  At the same time, Johnny' struggle is not so much to escape the police as to extract something worthwhile from his life, which he understands is ending.  The themes of justice and redemption thread through the narrative and combine at the end, when Johnny and Agnes die by Agnes's own hand. 
     Reed read the novel when it was released, finding himself intrigued, as he put it, by the story of someone "who had done something wrong for the right reasons," though in my mind it isn't clear whether he was referring to Johnny or Agnes.  Green had also, before the war, had a novel adapted for the screen in which Reed's wife of the time played a role.   Reed immediately purchased an option on Odd Man Out.  At the time, he was under contract to the J. Arthur Rank studio (Bonnnnggggggg!), where there was some reticence about making a film in which the sympathetic central character is a terrorist and in which the love interests die at the end.  But World War II had somewhat weakened the argument that people went to the pictures for distraction and cheering up.  Given what the British had been through, the death of a couple of fictional characters seemed something they might be able to handle.  As Reed himself said, "People who were plunged into the war were so immersed in reality that nowadays they expect it . . . in pictures."  Reed also persuaded his masters at Rank that the film would play well in America, where The Stars Look Down and Night Train to Munich had drawn well.
The studio people agreed to go ahead and were cheered about commercial prospects when Mason signed on as Johnny (renamed Johnny McQueen for the film).  For most of the other parts, Reed, who was generally uncompromising about matters of authenticity, went to Dublin's Abbey Theater for actors who could work in the distinctive Belfast accent.  For the part of Father Tom, a priest to whom Agnes (renamed Kathleen in the film) turns for help in finding Johnny, Reed cast none other than W.G. Fay, who had founded the Abbey with William Butler Yeats in 1904 and now managed the company.  For Pat and Foley, members of the robbery team, Reed also brought on, respectively, Cyril Cusack (he made something like eighty films between the ages of five and eighty-two) and Dan O'Herlihy (the title, and practically the only, role in Buñuel's Robinson Crusoe, 1954).  He also settled upon the brilliant F.J. McCormick for the role of Shell, the bird man.  The only prominent English actor besides Mason was Robert Newton, who plays Lukey, the painter.
     Green worked on the script, but nervously, because he knew nothing about screenwriting, and Reed brought in R.C. Sherriff, who had done the film version of Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939).  Green moved into Reed's London flat for several weeks, bringing a typewriter and phonograph, on which he played music while he wrote--the only way, he insisted, that he could work.  The three of them eventually came up with something Reed could shoot.
     Of all Reed's choices, though, perhaps the most critical was his director of photography, Robert Krasker, a man with whom he had not worked before.  Krasker was born in Australia of French and Austrian parents.  He came to Paris to paint, threw it over for photography, and went to Germany to study cinematography, where he learned the lighting techniques of German expressionism.  He returned to Paris in the early '30s, then made his way across the Channel.  After earning his stripes as an assistant, he began to build a major reputation with  his work in color on Laurence Olivier's Henry V (1944) and in black-and-white on Lean's Brief Encounter. 
     On the surface, there is nothing remarkable about this preproduction work, but consider: Reed, who had bristled under happy-ending conventions in the '30s, surely saw Odd Man Out as a breakthrough, a chance to do something new and significant, something that matched what he saw as the temper of the times.  This was not "just another picture."  He had come up with  established actors, had been given the green light (within an admittedly modest budget) to work with as much authenticity as possible, and he found someone who could help him build a distinctive visual style.  In retrospect, it's not all that surprising that the film turned out to be a major leap forward in his development.

Justice and Redemption
In both novel and film, there is little doubt from the outset that Johnny is doomed.  He has been in lockup or hiding so long that he is a stranger to human society, and the people around him worry that he won't be able to handle the robbery.  In the film, his number two in the Organization, Dennis (Robert Beatty), urges Johnny to stand aside for this one job, to let him handle the robbery; Kathleen supports this view.  Johnny dismisses them both, good naturedly and full of confidence, but we believe the cautions; Mason seems to carry a weight his character may not consciously notice but that we can see, a burden of interior knowledge, that tells us this will be Johnny's last job.  Once out of the hiding place and on the way to the mill, Johnny becomes increasingly disoriented-all this traffic, all this space, all these people in the mill.  The men fill a couple of bags with money, make their way out to the car, but a cashier follows, carrying a pistol.  He and Johnny struggle, there are two shots, one of which hits Johnny in the shoulder, the other killing the cashier.  Johnny tries to jump into the car as it takes off, but can only make it to the running board; his friends hold on to him, but on a sharp turn, he falls into the street.  The car goes on for half a block and the men in it argue.  They must go back and pick up Johnny, but Pat, the nervous driver, resists: they have to move out, and fast, the police will be on them in seconds, Johnny will be all right, look, he's moving already.  No, we have to go back for him.  No, it's too late, we'll all be caught.  Go get him, and now.  They don't go back.
     On hearing the news, Dennis goes out to hunt for Johnny after telling Kathleen, who also wants to find him, "As long as he lives, he'll belong to the Organization."  Dennis finds Johnny in an abandoned air raid shelter not far from where he fell off the car.  Johnny, who is passing in and out of delirium and is never entirely convinced he isn't dreaming, seems principally worried about whether the cashier he shot has died.  Dennis tries to lead the police in the opposite direction while Johnny takes off for a safe hideout, although in short order Dennis is captured.
By this point in the film, night has fallen, and before long it begins snowing.  In certain respects, it is the point in Odd Man Out at which Krasker takes over.  Johnny staggers through the streets, the paving stones shining in the occasional streetlight, his shadow thrown up against the nearest wall.  The city becomes a projection of Johnny's dreams, full of menacing dark corners and surreal shapes, but also with deep vistas brought out by a wide-angle lens, promising vast space with shelter-or is it oblivion?   
     The action now moves back and forth between Johnny's flight, the pursuit by the police, and Kathleen's search for him.  Johnny finds himself in a city where he hopes he has many friends, but in which actual betrayal lurks everywhere, all italicized by Krasker's cinematography.  Pat and Foley, on the run through dark alleys, are taken in by Teresa (the glorious Maureen Delany), who liquors them up and then sells them out to the police, who mow them down outside her house.  There are people who want to help, but are nervous; people who want nothing to do with the IRA but also take pity on Johnny and would not touch the reward money the IRC has put out for him.  The most interesting of these is a pair of middle-aged housewives, flawlessly played by Fay Compton and Beryl Measor.  (They play off each other so smoothly and naturally that you cannot believe it is acting you're watching, and only if you play the scene again do you recall that these two came out of a rich theatrical tradition which schooled them in clarity, respect for the text and the character, and timing.  You cannot imagine one of them asking, "What's my motivation?")  But there is also the curious trio of Shell, Tabor, and Lukey, squatters in a tumbledown building: Shell (McCormick), who runs across Johnny and is very much interested in the reward; Tabor, a former medical student for some reason on the bum; and Lukey (Newton), a boozy painter who hears Johnny has been wounded, must be dying, and wants to paint the light in his eyes at the decisive moment. 
     Through it all, Johnny occupies an uncertain status: he is a  murderer, a terrorist; he is also wounded and dying, thus deserving of some compassion; he is giving his life for a cause in which he deeply believes, but one which involves him in taking and endangering lives; he is loved by a good woman.  Reed obviously could not, and in all likelihood did not wish to, sympathize with the objectives of the IRA by making its Belfast chief a hero.  But he also had to keep us caring about Johnny, not willing to consign him to the hangman and good riddance.  Two devices accomplish this task: the pain Mason vividly experiences, which humanizes the character, and the low angle from which he is repeatedly shot, which elevates him.  He is not exactly a villain, not exactly a hero; he is a human being with human problems, trying desperately to give meaning to a life about to end and perhaps finding that the only meaning he can give it is by the ending of it.
     The police are embodied in the chief constable played by one of my favorites from this period of English film, Dennis O'Dea.  It's a difficult part.  He must embody British authority-foreign, oppressive, everything hated in Catholic Belfast.  But he also personifies justice, which the film and novel alike insist are to be served, and so we must accept his ultimate triumph.  The IRC visits the little house in which Kathleen and her grandmother hid Johnny, and there is a chilling scene between Kathleen and the chief constable.  The constable is correct, cool, distant, implacable, and where Johnny's colleague Dennis had told her that Johnny would always belong to the Organization, the constable tells her, "He belongs to the law now."  He carries an ominous little stick, a sort of cross between a small shillelagh and a field baton.  When Kathleen refuses to look at him as he questions her, he puts the stick under her chin and tilts her head up.  It is a gesture that says he can do anything and, though no text supports it, I believe it is decisive in setting her on her course to find him and, in her fashion, redeem him. 
     It is Shell and Kathleen who ultimately find Johnny.  They meet at Father Tom's rectory; he is the (stock) kindly priest who serves as the story's pathway to redemption.  Kathleen, who is by this time carrying a gun, and who lets Father Tom know it, is intent upon finding Johnny and, if she cannot make an inflexible deadline for a getaway being prepared by the Organization, ending it for both of them rather than see him executed for the murder of the cashier.  This way, she believes, he will not die alone.  Shell goes to the priest hoping for help in getting the reward, but is convinced by Father Tom that "a greater reward" is available to him if he will simply say where Johnny is hiding. 
     At the end, Shell leads Johnny to a spot where Kathleen can find him, whereupon she and Johnny are surrounded by the police.  Although Father Tom has tried to convince her that she cannot take justice into her own hands, she is determined, once it is clear they can't make the getaway, to end this the way she sees best.  At the climax, Johnny and Kathleen are backed against a fence; the IRC advances, weapons drawn, while Kathleen's hand slips into her overcoat and pulls out her pistol.  The film poses no objection to her solution to their terrible predicament. 
     But somebody else did.  In the novel, Agnes fires two shots, killing Johnny and herself, and the police find their bodies on the pavement.  But while filming in London, Reed received a visit on set from Joseph Breen, who succeeded Will Hays as the chief censor of the Motion Picture Association of America.  Breen had seen a copy of the script and was uneasy about passing the film for US distribution because Kathleen kills Johnny, allowing him to escape formal justice.  Breen suggested that the police shoot the two of them as they close in.  Wapshott quotes Reed: "I agreed, but I got out of it.  While the police are following them, she understands that Mason will never make it to the [getaway] boat, so I had her turn around, fire at the police, and thus cause them to return fire and kill both. Everybody was satisfied. But I made her clearly fire toward the ground."  Does she indeed?  The print I have, taped from television, distinctly shows Kathleen's hand holding the gun and firing outward toward the police.  There is not the slightest hint of the gun being aimed at the ground, or away from the IRC.  A fusillade follows, and both justice and redemption are served.
     As I watch it, I can only find two flaws in the film.  One, reasonably minor although annoying, is the process shot from inside the escape car as it races away from the robbery scene with Johnny clinging to the running board.  It's such an obvious fake, and the tones and texture of the rear projection are at such variance with the foreground, that you sigh in disappointment just when you should be clenched with excitement and suspense.  The other, more significant, is Newton's performance as Lukey.  Newton seems to have been tuning up for his career-defining Long John Silver role in Treasure Island (1950) as early as 1945 in his gig as Pistol in Henry V.  Lukey gets him even closer.  It's grossly exaggerated, seems clumsy and hammy compared to the exquisite fine tuning in all the rest of the playing, and keeps threatening to derail the last part of the film.
     Even so, the strengths of Odd Man Out overcome.  The assured and striking visual style, with its hypnotic night scenes, the magnificent acting in even the tiniest roles, and the steady, indeed inexorable progress of Johnny toward a fate that he ultimately makes no effort to reject all combine to make an uncommonly rewarding experience.  And Carol Reed, an established filmmaker, had just vaulted to a new level.  But he didn't stay there long.

The Fallen Idol
There was a certain temptation, resisted (I'm sure you're glad to hear), to call this little essay, "Carol Reed's Green(e) Years."  Immediately after making a film of F.L. Green's novel and script, Reed was thrown together with Graham Greene, for some years a writer whose fiction was frequently of the highest quality but who simply wasn't able to sell many books.  For money, he also wrote travel literature, film criticism, worked in movies, just about anything that would pay.  While returning by ship from a trip to Africa in the mid-1930s, Greene wrote a story called "The Basement Room" to combat boredom.  He published it and, he claims, forgot about it.  (The story is reprinted in Graham Greene, The Third Man/The Fallen Idol, London, Penguin paperback [1971], which also includes brief introductions to "The Basement Room" and to "The Third Man," a story written as a sort of foundation for the film script.  Greene provides a few more paragraphs about his work on the films in Ways of Escape, London, Penguin paperback [1981].  Both books may still be in print, and are widely available through internet used and rare booksellers.)
     It was known in the London filmmaking community after the war that Reed was eager to slip the J. Arthur Rank harness, and Alexander Korda, the one-time director and now producer, was equally eager to work with Reed.    Korda suggested to Greene that he work up "The Basement Room" into a film script for Reed.  Greene had a little trouble seeing it as a film, but Korda knew better (it is a bitter but undeniable truth that producers occasionally know better than writers). 
The story, which is very short, is set in a very large house in Belgravia, one of west London's old-money districts.  The seven-year-old son of the family, Phil, has his closest, indeed only loving, relationship with Baines, the head of the household staff.  Baines always refers to the boy as Phil, while Mrs. Baines, his cold and controlling wife, calls him Master Phil and constantly reminds him that trivial little behaviors and missteps can be called to the attention of Phil's mother.  But it also transpires that Baines has a girlfriend, whom he explains to Phil as his niece when the boy by chance sees them together.  Baines swears Phil to secrecy, which is a burden the boy does not appreciate.  Mrs. Baines learns about the girl, prying the secret out of Phil and then insisting that this knowledge of hers be a secret between them.  The burden of these adult secrets and his responsibility to keep them weighs even more heavily upon him.  Mrs. Baines hides in the house when Baines, believing she has left the city to visit her mother, invites his "niece" over.  Mrs. Baines exposes the lovers, she and her husband shove and slap and bite at the top of the stairs, and she tumbles over the banister--pushed? accidentally falling?--into the foyer below, dying from the fall.  The police investigate, and there is reason to believe they will find it an accident, but Phil, seeks to escape back into childhood with its absence of adult responsibilities.  "He loved Baines, but Baines had involved him in secrets, in fears he didn't understand. . . .  That was what happened when you loved: you got involved; and Philip extricated himself from life, from love, from Baines with a merciless egotism."  His account leaves Baines no choice besides "coming clean."

From Basement to Landing and Ledge
Greene describes turning "The Basement Room" into The Fallen Idol (a title he disowns) as a remarkable exercise in mutual respect between himself and a director who had established a reputation as someone whose principal goal was to get the author's central idea upon on the screen.  Nor did Reed ever have a writer so subtle, with such ironic bite, and with a better innate sense of telling stories through words and pictures combined.  Greene said that the changes they started making to the story came from them both, and, with only a few exceptions, he could not look back and say with confidence who was responsible for what.  (Greene did say that Reed correctly insisted upon changing the setting from a private home in Belgravia to a foreign embassy, apparently French, on the ground that by 1947 the Belgravia mansion of 1935 had become "a period piece."  He remembered a few other details: the clock winder who insists upon doing his job, murder or no murder, was Reed's idea; MacGregor the snake was Greene's, because "I have always liked snakes.")  It does seem likely, however, that Reed took the initiative in trying to turn the story upon itself from within, although I have no doubt that Greene, once sold on this idea, provided some of the more interesting turns.
According to Greene, the actual writing, once a number of conversations had taken place, was conducted in a Brighton hotel, with Reed in one of two connecting rooms, Greene in the other, and a secretary.  The story went back and forth between them as they progressed forward through the scenes.  In ten days, they had finished. 
     The burdensomeness of adult secrets was an inner story, best told in third-person narrative.  Reed and Greene changed it subtly into a story that could be seen clearly on the surface.  The script pays careful attention to the fabric of lies, exaggerations, and misunderstandings which the characters unthinkingly weave before the pivotal event of Mrs. Baines's death.  Then, instead of Phil turning against Baines, he lies to the police to help Baines, whom he thinks must have pushed her.  But Baines has also embroidered the stories he has told to Phil about his own youthful exploits, including one about killing a man, and lied about Julie (played by Michèle Morgan) being his niece, then lies to the police, all of which gets entangled with Phil's own lies to them.  Baines is thus implicated in what begins to look like a murder-but was not (whatever it may have been in the story). 
For in the film, Mrs. Baines's brief struggle with her husband at the top of the stairs is not responsible for her death.  That scuffle ends without incident.  Baines then hurries off to the room where he has put Julie.  Instead of trying to  follow, Mrs. Baines rushes to a ledge next to the landing with an interior window into that room where Baines has gone, and from there she slips and falls by accident, something seen by neither Baines nor Phil nor Julie nor any other person outside the audience.  So while we know that her death was not murder, and Baines knows he did not push her, Phil thinks Baines might have pushed her and the rat's nest of lies which the police uncover inclines them in the same direction. 
     Then, just as they are about to arrest Baines, the police discover evidence on that ledge which allows them quickly to reconstruct just what happened.  They realize that it was an accident, that Baines was blameless.  Simultaneously, Julie is able to convince Phil that his lies have brought Baines perilously close to a terrible injustice.  She persuades him to start telling the truth.  He immediately does so--telling truths which, though strictly speaking irrelevant, are also accurate and could conceivably upset the forensic information they have just discovered on the ledge which exonerates Baines.  But of course the police now see him still as the liar he has been, and dismiss him.  Just as all is being put right, there is some question as to where justice lies, on the side of lies or the side of truth. 

An Actors' Film
This lumpy summary is nearly wrinkle free in the film, in part thanks to Reed's confident narrative and in part to Greene's ability to insert interstices of irony at just the right juncture.  (I say "nearly" wrinkle free because it's a little hard to believe that this team of police professionals, who give the stairway and landing such a forensic going over, could have missed the evidence they later discover a few feet away on that ledge.)  But while the writing and storytelling are superb, this is an actors' film, or rather a film in which the director knew just what he wanted the actors to do, and they did it.
     Baines is played by Ralph Richardson.  Sixty years ago, that would have been enough to say right there.  Richardson, although later knighted and known as one of Britain's "acting lords" along with Olivier and Gielgud, was in fact peerless.  His confidence, his control of his marvelous voice, his ability to fill out a character with small inflections and gestures, his altering of mood with his eyes-the man was masterful, rarely more so than here.  But here, he is more than ably supported by Sonia Dresdel, whose Mrs. Baines can turn you cold inside.  The police come as a threesome: Dennis O'Dea as Inspector Crowe, Jack Hawkins as Detective Ames, and Bernard Lee as Detective Hart.  Ames does most of the detecting, Crowe puts it together and does most of the interrogation, and Ames is brought along to interpret for his colleagues with the French embassy staff.  (It's a typical Greene joke that the embassy chef de cabinet insists upon answering Hart's stiff, schoolboy French with much better English.)  Lee is mustachioed, thinner, and far more youthful than we'll ever see him again, even just a year later as Sergeant Paine in The Third Man. 
     Reed understood, however, that the movie would stand or fall on the performance of the boy playing eight-year-old Phil, or Philippe.  He would be in most of the scenes, and if belief in him faltered, if he could not show the certainties and confusions and feelings of his character, Reed had nothing for his trouble and for Korda's money.  He  undertook an extensive and fruitless search for just the right boy.  But toward the end of it, he noticed the photograph on the cover of a book, a memoir by an émigré Frenchman named Robert Henrey.  The photograph was of Henrey's son, Bobby, and the book was about the family's escape from the Nazis and relocation in England--at the time, in a house close to Reed's Mayfair neighborhood.  Reed met the father, then the son, decided to take the leap.  He thought the boy was teachable, looked right, and had the advantage of speaking English with a slight French accent, as would be natural for the son of the French ambassador.
     Reed was right, and Henrey is sensational in the film, but only because Reed got the boy to act.  Reed hit upon the ingenious device of having Bobby be Phil by being Bobby, by acting the way he ordinarily behaved--but of which, at eight, he had no awareness.  Reed watched him between takes on the set, watched him walk and talk and gesture and play, then got him to replicate all that without telling him that's what he was doing.  He also employed some clever prompts.  In the opening, Phil stands at the top of the stairs (where the climactic action will take place) and beams down in warm enjoyment at Baines.  We look down on Baines from above, then get a reverse reaction shot of Phil.  But his beam isn't really acting: Reed had a magician at the foot of the stairs performing a few tricks, and it's that Bobby Henrey is beaming about. 
     Bobby's mother, Madeleine Henrey, had it written into the boy's contract that she would be on the set every day, and she was indeed there, but wisely kept out of Reed's way.  There was only one incident.  On a Friday afternoon, they started shooting a brief scene in which Phil climbs the stairs.  They completed the first part of the take, shot from the bottom of  the stairs, in which Phil gets about half-way up.  They decided to wrap for the weekend for the second part, which would pick up the action from the top of the stairs for the rest of Phil's climb.  Over the weekend, Madeleine decided Bobby was getting a little shaggy around the ears, so she took him for a haircut.  On Monday, Reed of course noticed it instantly, and blew a fuse, explaining none too patiently to Madeleine that Phil was unlikely to have lost a significant amount of hair on his way up the staircase.  They shot the scene again from the beginning, something the budget-conscious Reed did with smoke coming out of his ears. 
     One final, interesting note.  Robert Krasker was unavailable to serve as DP for The Fallen Idol, so Reed went for next best: Georges Périnal, Krasker's main inspiration and mentor.  The look of the film is entirely different from Odd Man Out--light, open, with outdoor spaces and sunlit balconies and a walk through the zoo, and the large interior foyer/staircase/landing of the embassy.  Different, that is, with one exception.  On the night Mrs. Baines falls (is pushed, Phil fears), he panics and bolts out of the embassy in his pajamas, chasing about the neighborhood, which has suddenly turned into a warren of deserted narrow streets and alleys.  The paving stones are wet and shiny with rain, ill-lit, throwing shadows of Phil up on the walls as he runs-ultimately into the arms of a policeman, who takes him to the station house.  (Eventually, they return him to the embassy, where the investigation into Mrs. Baines's death has already begun, but before they leave the station, Greene sneaks in a terrific little joke by a tart under arrest.)  The nighttime street images are the duplicate of those we saw repeatedly throughout Reed's Belfast film.  Reed had become absorbed with these images, this feel, this correlative of urban fear and anxiety.  Within a year, he and Krasker, working together once more, would incorporate them unforgettably into perhaps the greatest British film ever made.

The Third Man
Far too much has been written about The Third Man to warrant my going over all that much of the same ground here.  Those who are interested--and how can anyone see one of the most admired films ever produced, and not want to know more?--are referred to Charles Drazin, In Search of the Third Man (Limelight paperback, 2000), an utterly invaluable trove of interesting information and anecdote, and the briefer but still interesting addition to the British Film Institute's "Film Classics" series by Rob White, The Third Man, London, bfi publishing (2003).  Both books are packed with illustrations. 
     Guy Hamilton was the assistant director on both Idol and The Third Man.  (He later directed some of the early Sean Connery Bond films, in which Bernard Lee played M.)  Hamilton recalled that, as the rigors of getting a performance out of Bobby Henrey were running the budget right up to the limit, Reed told him they were going to have to do a quickie next, something where they could afford to cut corners, perhaps a comedy mystery.  Greene says that Alexander Korda dined with him while Idol was still shooting and encouraged him to develop another story for Reed, preferably something in post-war Vienna.  Greene had nothing in the drawer that might serve as a starting point with the (remote but possible) exception of a sentence he had "long before" scribbled on the back of an envelope: "I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin had been lowered into the frozen February ground, so that it was with incredulity that I saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, among the host of strangers in the Strand." 
     Korda was insistent about his preference for the setting-Vienna, old world atmosphere with the ravages of war all about and the new world much in evidence.  The city was one of those administered in four zones by, respectively, the British, the French, the Russians, and the Americans, with a central section cooperatively overseen by all four under a rotating chairmanship.  He sent Greene to Vienna for two weeks of soaking up atmosphere in February 1948, and Greene found atmosphere aplenty--seedy cafés, signs of the black market, the sewers (which afforded one movement from one zone to another without the necessity of showing your papers), even stories about the racket in stolen and diluted penicillin.  At length, he retreated to Italy and wrote a story, narrated by a policeman in the British occupation force named Callaway, about an Englishman named Rollo Martins who came to Vienna to find his old friend, Harry Lime.  The story wasn't meant to be a script, which Greene maintained he could not write without doing a story first.  He showed Korda and Reed the story and went back to Vienna in July 1948 with Reed.  (In five months, there had been a fair amount of reconstruction, and Greene was dismayed to see that the decrepitude he had told Reed about was rapidly disappearing.)  In short order, they once again put together a shooting script and Reed went about casting the film with Korda and a new, altogether formidable, partner.
     David O. Selznick, who had produced Gone with the Wind (1939), liked Reed's work and track record in the US.  He offered Korda money--dollars, in those days worth something abroad--and access to performers he had under contract in return for US distribution rights (and profits).  There was much tinkering with the script from Selznick's end, suggestions which annoyed Greene but which Reed, whose professional life was after all dealing with producers, usually met with a standard response: "Graham and I will think it over."  (Once the film was completed and sent to the US, of course, Selznick got out the rewrote and recut parts of the film to suit what he thought an American audience wanted.)  Selznick was not, however, only an irritant; he made some significant suggestions, including turning Martins and Lime into Americans to appeal to an American audience.  When the characters were British, Korda had wanted them played, respectively, by Cary Grant and Noël Coward.  If you think about the finished film and try to imagine these two actors in those two roles, you begin to understand that a great work of art is not so much a matter of destiny as of circumstance and luck.  As the Duke of Wellington said about the Battle of Waterloo, "It was a close-run thing, a damned close-run thing."  When Selznick got involved and the characters became American, he put forward Joseph Cotten, who was under contract to him, as was Alida Valli, whom he wanted for the role of Anna, Lime's Hungarian (changed in the film to Czech) lover.  (Cotten, looking at the script, objected to his character's given name, "Rollo," on the grounds that it sounded "homosexual."  Unaccountably, he was happy to settle for the change to "Holly.")  Orson Welles was finally hit upon for Lime, not without misgivings which turned out to be justified.  Nicholas Wapshott, in his biography of Reed, devotes a long passage to the pursuit of Welles by Vincent Korda, Alexander's brother, chasing him from one Italian city to another with contract in hand.  Once on the set, however, Welles was for the most part the model of restraint and cooperation. 
     It is obvious from the finished product that, along the way, Reed's thinking about the film evolved from a quickie, a comedy thriller.  But I see no evidence that he began to have the kind of ambition for it that later infected David Lean for The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962).    Reed kept The Third Man in human scale and worked with the meticulous craftsmanship that had guided his two previous efforts.  You had a story, and good characters, an interesting place to shoot.  If you told that story well--with authenticity, honesty, and tight pacing--and saw to it that the characters were well played, you had something worth doing.  The Third Man become something rather more than that not because Reed tried to impose greatness on it, but because he built it from the inside out.

The City as Character
Like its two predecessors in Reed's career, The Third Man was a film set in a city and, like Odd Man Out rather more than The Fallen Idol, the city's atmospherics shaped the story.  Reed brought Robert Krasker back as DP for The Third Man, and Krasker's reward was an Oscar for cinematography.  But while it's hard to think of a film that did more to build and enhance mood effectively with lighting and camera angles, Vienna was more than a setting for a story and a style.  Consider the opening words, spoken by an unnamed British narrator (the voice is Reed's) over a quick rush of shots of the city emphasizing its beaten, battered, "bombed about a bit" face and people: 

     "I never knew the old Vienna before the war, with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm.  Constantinople suited me better.  I really got to know it in the classic period of the Black Market-we'd run anything, if people wanted it enough-mmm-had the money to pay.  Of course, a situation like that does tempt amateurs-but, well, you know they can't stay the course like a professional.  Now the city, it's divided into four zones, you know, each occupied by a power, the American, the British, the Russian and the French.   But the center of the city, that's international, policed by an international patrol, one member of each of the four powers.  Wonderful.  What a hope they had, all strangers to the place, and none of them could speak the same language, except a sort of smattering of German.  Good fellows on the whole, did their best, you know.  Vienna doesn't look any worse than a lot of other European cities, bombed about a bit.  Oh wait, I was going to tell you, I was going to tell you about Holly Martins, an American.  Came all the way to visit a friend of his.  The name was Lime, Harry Lime.  Now Martins was broke, and Lime had offered him some sort, I don't know, some sort of a job.  Anyway, there he was, poor chap, happy as a lark and without a cent."
     In this introduction, Holly and Harry are something of an afterthought-"Oh wait . . ."  The real story is about Vienna, and so it was in the movie.  This is not a story about a man who comes looking for a friend, but about a city in which a man comes looking for a friend, to his despair loses him, then to his greater despair finds him.  But the despair arises less from the circumstances of losing and find, than from the city in which that takes place.  The war is still here in Vienna, in a way it had never reached America and which England--although in 1948 still experiencing substantial deprivation--had in some measure escaped.  There are shortages of practically everything--food, electricity, jobs, freedom, dignity.  Most people will do anything to get by; a few will go farther, grab the few chances at great fortune that exist, no matter the cost to others.  Everything here is in and of a city at an historical watershed, and by encouraging that story to come out from within, the film outgrew its thriller origins.
     Most of the interesting settings are either location shots within the city (the cemetery, the Prater amusement park and wheel, the street where Harry was "killed," the café where the trap for Harry is set, the huge fields of rubble, the sewers) or, if sets, are still convincingly a part of Vienna: Anna's dressing room at the Josefstadt theater, Harry's old apartment overlooking the site of the "accident," Anna's apartment, where the window opens out onto the street where Holly sees Harry in the doorway.  Many of the scenes shot at night return to the techniques of Odd Man Out and the one night sequence of The Fallen Idol, deep shadows and shiny pavements, lights throwing images of a running man on an alley wall.  (In Vienna, no small part of  Reed's budget went for getting hoses hooked up to working hydrants and mains to wet down the streets and walls.) 
     For all of Reed's commitment to authenticity in Odd Man Out, we come out it having been in "Belfast," because that is what we are told, and the illusion is effective enough.  But for all the little compromises he had to make in The Third Man, for all the studio shots and rear projections, we come out utterly convinced that we have been in Vienna, that we know what it was like there at the time, and we can feel the moods that infused its characters.  We know what those shadows felt like, we know what those sewers smelled like (though in fact in the main line, influx from non-sewage tributaries kept the smell quite fresh and sweet), we know how the ersatz coffee tasted.

The Puzzle of Loyalty
Consider the story of Holly Martins.  He comes to Vienna to find an old friend, who turns out to be dead.  But the friend has left behind a girl friend, whom Holly can't quite ignore.  He stays, in part because he doesn't think that the charges of gangsterism Colonel Callaway levels against the late Harry can be true, in part because he can't get the girl out of his head.  (It's Alida Valli, who can blame him?)  So Holly's loyalty to the memory of his friend keeps him around, but his loyalty stops at the doorstep of the girl, who still has strong feelings for Harry but whom Holly tries to seduce away, in his own fumbling fashion.
     But Anna's loyalty to Harry, or at least to her memories of him, is powerful, and she's not giving an inch to Holly's charm, if that is what it is.  He finds that Harry is still alive, he is finally persuaded that Harry is an unscrupulous racketeer, and still he is only brought over to Callaway's side and announce his willingness to help trap Harry when Callaway agrees to help Anna in her troubles with the Russians.  But Anna finds out, and her loyalty to Harry is more powerful than her fear of deportation to a Russian-controlled country.  Holly backs out of the deal: loyalty to Harry or trying to make up to Anna for his betrayal?  But Callaway persuades him again, this time with the spectacle of suffering children, victims of Harry's penicillin racket.  But when he acts as the bait in Callaway's trap for Harry, Anna--still loyal to Harry--intervenes.  Harry almost gets away through the sewers, but the police close in, and Holly kills Harry, but only after Harry has killed Callaway's loyal Sergeant Payne.
     This time, Harry is buried for good, and as at the first "funeral," Anna and Holly are both present.  Callaway is trying to get Holly out of Vienna, but Holly wants to give it one more try with Anna.  He waits, in the foreground, as she walks down one of the long allées of the cemetery directly at the camera, framed by trees stripped bare by winter, accompanied by the immortal strains of Anton Karas's zither, taking a long time to approach, and although they are the only people there, she goes past him without taking any notice.  Her love for Harry, her loyalty to him, are unshakeable.  It is, I believe, one of the greatest endings in all cinema (shot not by Krasker, but by a second-unit cameraman named Hans Schneeberger, a former lover of Leni Riefenstahl), and in perfect harmony with the central theme of this story.   
     It was a theme present of course in the earlier films: Johnny's tragic loyalty to the cause, which got him killed along with the cashier; Kathleen's loyalty to Johnny, which entailed her own death; the criss-crossing filaments of loyalty and betrayal which made up Belfast; Phil's loyalty to Baines, built partly on the charm of Baines's stories--which is to say lies; the near-disaster that loyalty almost brings on Baines as the police deduce from Phil's own lies that Baines is lying.  And much, much more.  (Comments, please.)  Here, it emerges fully developed and perfectly integrated with story, photography, acting, and music, and forms the fitting conclusion to a run of Carol Reed's finest work.

Afterword
I've tried to account for the superiority of these three films compared to Reed's preceding and subsequent work, but it's been mostly bits and pieces of explanations rather than a general theory: good scripts, especially the work with Greene (although they worked together again on the much lesser Our Man in Havana); the collaboration with Krasker and the development of a vision uniquely appropriate to two of the three films and used briefly in the third; the postwar willingness to depart from standard happy endings, although the ending of The Fallen Idol is "happy" in the sense that Baines is cleared, because Greene leaves us with his ironic skepticism about people's ability to separate truth from lies; the availability of outstanding acting talent--Mason, the Abbey Theatre players, Richardson, Dresdel, Henrey, O'Dea, Cotten, Valli, Welles, Howard, and all those German-speaking actors in The Third Man (my favorite is Siegfried Breuer as Popescu, the Romanian, although Ernst Deutsch as "Baron" Kurtz is hard to beat) about who you can read more in Drazin and White; the modesty of Reed's aims, his dedication to making the best within a framework he understood rather than attempt epic reach.  I'm sure there's more. 
     At the risk of blundering into the biographical fallacy, I will mention one more.  Early in the war, when Reed was engaged to Diana Wynyard, an actress, he met another young actress, Penelope (Pempie) Ward.  (Gossip alert: Pempie's mother had carried on an affair with the Prince of Wales from 1919 to 1934, the Prince of Wales who became Edward VIII before abdicating and becoming the Duke of Windsor.)  Reed fell hard for Pempie, but ultimately decided to honor his engagement with Diana, while Pempie went to the US for the duration.  But Reed knew it was a mistake, and as soon as wartime travel regulations were relaxed, he began going regularly to America to rekindle the affair with Pempie.  Early in 1948, he divorced Diana and married his true love.  I have no documentary evidence for this, outside of general agreement that returning to the one true love of his life--sorry, but that's the way Reed talked about it--in late 1945 and marrying her two and a half years later corresponded exactly with his period of greatest productivity.  Erotic tension=creative stimulation?  Anyway, there it is.
     Finally, of course, it may be that these things are inexplicable, or a product of luck, which is almost to say the whole thing.  Maybe there is something about the law of averages, or the bell-shaped curve of one's creative output, or whatever, that says three very great films is one hell of a streak.  There are a few filmmakers who have had streaks as good, but rarely longer.  I'm thinking, without cracking a book here, of Antonioni, Fellini, Ford, Renoir, Ozu, and Kurosawa--pretty good company for Reed.  I probably missed quite a few.  Of course, there is the occasional career that is a streak: Chaplin comes to mind.  There are so many variables in filmmaking, from talent to money to time and focus and confidence that getting one great film in a row is rare enough. 
     James Mason went on to that Hollywood career he wanted, often as a heavy, roles in which he was uncommonly effective and indeed scared the bejabbers out of me as an early teenager.  I saw him one late winter day, not long before he died (1984), walking up Park Avenue alone, bundled against the cold.  As I passed, going the opposite direction, he looked me squarely in the eye with an expression I had seen often on the screen, and I felt fear.  Graham Greene of course became one of the best writers never to win the Nobel Prize.  Richardson made many films, and his most distinguished efforts were in The Heiress (1949), The Outcast of the Islands (1951, with Reed directing), as Buckingham in Olivier's Richard III (1955), and as James Tyrone in Sidney Lumet's Long Day's Journey into Night (1962).  There were also a lot of trivial roles to which he gave far more than they deserved: let his astounding turn as the Victorian windbag polymath in The Wrong Box (1966) stand for them all.  Cotten's days as a leading man were just about over; he was forty-four in 1949, and his roles thereafter were winnowing down into portrayals of what David Thomson accurately calls "henpecked middle age."  Welles was in steep decline, mostly because of his profligacy, his Falstaffian appetite, and his astounding gift for alienating those who controlled his future.  Othello (1952) was still in front of him--filming on it was stalled for lack of funds and he took the $100,000 offered for The Third Man to help complete it--as was A Touch of Evil (1958).  The roles were becoming caricatures, though, and the filmmaking dwindling down to bad ideas and near misses.  Trevor Howard had made his bones with Brief Encounter and his Colonel Callaway and Peter Willems in The Outcast of the Islands was as much evidence of versatility as you could ask for.  But for all that, he had character actor written all over him, and that is where he did most of his work thereafter.  I saw him in 1962 in a play in London, author and title forgotten about a week later, and while he had electricity--this man knew how to make you look at and listen to him; just run your DVD of The Third Man up to the scene when the police invade Anna's apartment and find out how one man in a crowd exudes authority by playing it down--it seemed to work best in smaller parts.  Finally, Alida Valli (b. 1921) is still around, as far as I can determine.  Middle age did nothing to dull her beauty or diminish her talent: have a look at three Bertolucci films, The Spider's Strategy (1970), 1900 (1975), and Luna (1979). 
There is a DVD available of Odd Man Out, which I have not seen.  As far as I know, The Fallen Idol is limited to a VHS copy made by Home Entertainment Inc., widely available; the one I purchased has somewhat muddy sound.  The Third Man is available in a 50th anniversary edition from Criterion Films; the extras are mildly interesting but hardly compelling, although the version of the film is uncommonly sharp.