Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of figures
- Introduction: romantics versus modernists?
- 1 1929: romantics and modernists on the cusp of sound
- 2 The running man: Hitchcock's fugitives and The Bourne Ultimatum
- 3 Running man 2: Carol Reed and his contemporaries
- 4 David Lean: the troubled romantic and the end of empire
- 5 The trauma film from romantic to modern: A Matter of Life and Death to Don't Look Now
- 6 Joseph Losey and Michelangelo Antonioni: the expatriate eye and the parallax view
- 7 Expatriate eye 2: Stanley Kubrick and Jerzy Skolimowski
- 8 Terence Davies and Bill Douglas: the poetics of memory
- 9 Conclusion: into the new century
- Select bibliography
- Index
- EUP JOURNALS ONLINE
3 - Running man 2: Carol Reed and his contemporaries
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of figures
- Introduction: romantics versus modernists?
- 1 1929: romantics and modernists on the cusp of sound
- 2 The running man: Hitchcock's fugitives and The Bourne Ultimatum
- 3 Running man 2: Carol Reed and his contemporaries
- 4 David Lean: the troubled romantic and the end of empire
- 5 The trauma film from romantic to modern: A Matter of Life and Death to Don't Look Now
- 6 Joseph Losey and Michelangelo Antonioni: the expatriate eye and the parallax view
- 7 Expatriate eye 2: Stanley Kubrick and Jerzy Skolimowski
- 8 Terence Davies and Bill Douglas: the poetics of memory
- 9 Conclusion: into the new century
- Select bibliography
- Index
- EUP JOURNALS ONLINE
Summary
Carol Reed makes the same shift as Hitchcock from romance to disenchantment but takes a very different route. He works closely within a mimetic idiom: his films rival those of the Italian neo-realists in the immediate postwar years. Here he is part of a wider movement in which fugitive film is just one dimension, the historic moment of romantic realism in British film, which is over, we could argue, almost as soon as it has begun. Romantic realism has three main components, all variations on the new mimesis. The first is the wartime documentary series of Humphrey Jennings, in particular Listen to Britain (1942) Fires Were Started and A Diary for Timothy (1946). The second is the combat drama-documentaries of Reed, Lean and others. The third, the wider remit of the fugitive genre which includes at a tangent two of Lean's most popular films, Brief Encounter and Great Expectations (1946). Of these the Jennings trilogy is arguably the most startling, the most innovative and the most compelling. In the fugitive genre the most important feature is Reed's Belfast tragedy, Odd Man Out, closely followed by Robert Hamer's East End drama for Ealing, It Always Rains on Sunday.
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- Romantics and Modernists in British Cinema , pp. 44 - 63Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010