The Quare Fellow-James Mason’s Odd Man Out  

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

Odd Man Out, starring James Mason, directed by Carol Reed (director of the noir classic The Third Man), 1947

No question being a revolutionary in non-revolutionary times is a tough dollar, or as the case here in the film under review, Odd Man Out, being such a stout-hearted fellow in Belfast (although the city is unnamed in the film but it has the look of that city and the kicker is the Royal Constabulary swarming all over the place in the 1940s), in the North, the North of Ireland after the partition which created a two-state solution in Ireland after the deal when down in the 1920s and the 1940s Irish Republican Army (IRA) partisans were left to swing in the wind. Yeah just ask stand-up IRA partisan Johnnie McQueen (although in the film the designation is simply “the organization” everybody knows what organization), a stand-up guy who did serious time in one His Majesty’s stinking prisons. Yeah, ask Johnny and the boys what’s what when times are tough and dough is tight to fight the fight for a one-state Ireland. A lot of good men, women too, including a quare fellow like Johnny have broken their teeth on that one.            

See in hard times, in times when the general population does not give a rat’s ass about unification (or whatever political program a revolutionary might be espousing) guys like Johnny and the boys have to keep body and soul together, to speak nothing of the organization, by an occasion robbery to refill the coffers. So Johnny and the boys plot and plan (after being given the assignment by that nefarious “organization”) to rob the local mill where the payroll cash will be a very good start on continuing to keep body and soul together. Naturally with stand-up Johnny as the leader. Stand-up or not though Johnny got ground down by prison, wasn’t up to leading this caper and while they grabbed the cash after that everything went to hell in a handbasket. It didn’t help that Johnny got caught up in a battle just before the getaway with some bravo who must have thought the dough being taken was personally his and in the melee got killed, got killed dead as it turned out. Johnny took a bullet too, a bullet wound which would drive the rest of the film.      

And that tells the tale of the rest of the film as Johnny is thrown pillar to post trying to dodge the coppers and get away, far away, from Belfast and the king’s sweet sweated gallows. Capturing the tensions, the mishaps, the poignancy of the streets of the town at night, a night that was filled with forebodings for Johnny, director Carol Reed as he did in The Third Man did a masterful job of cinematography capturing the back alleys and squalor of the “wrong side of the tracks” is really what drives us on to see what happens.

Well you know Johnny could come to no good end, had to take the fall one way or the other. Here is strange beauty of this plotline though. Johnny’s love interest, fellow partisan Kathleen, knowing that her man is going down, is going down hard, on her own makes a private “death pact,” wants to share Johnny’s fate. To insure that common fate as the coppers close in on Johnny Kathleen without flinching draws a pistol from her coat pocket and starts firing. Great noir touch.