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3 - Running man 2: Carol Reed and his contemporaries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2013

John Orr
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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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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Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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