(WARNING: story and plot twists of both The Third Man and Odd Man Out discussed in detail!)
Shuffling to Golgotha
Carol Reed's Odd Man Out (from the novel by F.L. Green) was released two years before his best-known work (The Third Man, 1949) and often suffers in viewers' minds when compared with the latter. Admittedly some elements in Third I find superior: Anton Karas' zither score, which sets a bouncy jaunty tone (sometimes unsettlingly so); Graham Greene's screenplay, which wields the Catholic elements with a lighter, more satiric edge; and the city of Vienna itself, its torn walls and rubbled streets prompting Reed's camera to view the world through a darker, more sharply skewed glass.
