Carol Reed (1953)

Further evidence that Carol Reed may be the most consistently good of all British film directors, Hitchcock included.  Susanne, a young British woman visits her brother and his wife in Cold War Berlin and is caught up in an espionage ring, smuggling secrets between the two sides of the Iron Curtain.  By the end of the opening scenes of Susanne’s arrival in the city and the events of her first evening there, you marvel at how strongly but unobtrusively Reed has built an atmosphere of uncertainty and suspicion.  All the way through, narrative development and character development are very well co-ordinated, and feed each other:  the suspense builds as the plot thickens and the people in the story become richer and more absorbing.  (Susanne’s lack of German is used to excellent dramatic effect – there are no subtitles so the audience is in the same boat.)

The film is very well acted.  The title character, Ivo Kern, is a former lawyer who fought for the Nazis and is now selling his expertise to German communists to kidnap and transport West Germans to the eastern bloc.  There’s a strong streak of self-loathing in James Mason’s Kern.  Mason also puts the character on a knife edge between carelessness and daring to care, and Kern eventually becomes an heroic and courageous figure.  Claire Bloom gives Susanne a truly resourceful spirit, which impels her into increasingly dangerous adventures and which keeps us rooting for her.  As Susanne’s sister-in-law Bettina, Hildegard Knef, although she reads her lines quite deliberately, is a strong and lovely presence.   Geoffrey Toone, as her doctor husband (and Susanne’s elder brother), creates a convincing blend of humane professionalism, uxorious affability and fraternal anxiety.  The scenes featuring Aribert Waescher as one of Kern’s key contacts are rather leadenly melodramatic but those involving a young boy on a bicycle (Dieter Krause), who’s devoted to Ivo Kern, are both dramatically effective and affecting (and remind you of Reed’s unfailing skill in directing child actors).

The Man Between is naturally compared with The Third Man, set in Vienna and which Reed made four years earlier.  Although the received critical wisdom is that The Third Man is his best film, I prefer this one (and others – The Stars Look Down, Odd Man Out, especially The Fallen Idol).  The screenplay for The Man Between is by Harry Kurnitz and Eric Linklater (based on a story by Walter Ebert). There are probably too many words – to explain the multiple deceptions taking place and the backstory – but the dialogue is often witty, and less self-consciously so than in The Third Man.   (I tend to think of Graham Greene’s script for The Third Man as paving the way for the tedious, cynical epigrammatism of John le Carré’s high-falutin spy writing.)   The location filming in Berlin makes the piece historically fascinating:  the production design was by Andrej Andrejew and the cinematography by Desmond Dickinson.

6 October 2009