Squint

Enjoyed OUR MAN IN HAVANA, which has some glorious writing and playing and looks absolutely gorgeous, yet oddly the weak point is Carol Reed’s direction — not a very weak point, since in fact much of it is excellent. But he’s devised a system for tilting the camera within a shot, disguised during a track or pan, so we start out even, balanced, and end up canted, askew. This development of his THIRD MAN style oddly does not integrate the dutch angles into the action more smoothly — it makes them pop out more. THE THIRD MAN manages to make its flamboyant visual style seem pretty natural, partly just by using squint angles so often they almost outnumber the straight ones — also, the vast majority of them are POV shots or are positioned like POVs. OMIH manages to make the diagonals work in widescreen, but it doesn’t manage to make them feel logical in the same way.

Reed also reuses a shot of Alec Guinness firing a gun during a climactic scene, in a way that makes no spatial sense and creates a distracting confusion. I don’t know what happened there.

Production designer Syd Cain smuggles his name onto this Buck Rogers type newspaper strip (click to enlarge).

But Reed does regularly serve up delicious performance moments and has assembled a rather astonishingly far-flung cast who gel beautifully, in defiance of all sense: Guinness, Noel Coward, Ralph Richardson all seem like they would fit naturally in the same film. But then you have to add Burl Ives, Ernie Kovacs, Maureen O’Hara (waitaminute…), John Le Mesurier, Rachel Roberts, Gregoire Aslan, Ferdy Maine… Reed manages to gather Obi Wan Kenobi, the King of Brobdignag and Count Von Krolock together in the same men’s room. The moment where Coward invites Guinness to visit the gents with him, for purposes of espionage, is a bit of an eye-popper.

Overall, though, the film impresses because its surface lustre and drolery combine with a tight plot with a strong theme — the theme that everybody running society is principly concerned with a series of arse-covering exercises, and they are honoured not for results produced but for successful buttock concealment. On top of that, largely through Burl Ives’ magnificent characterisation, the film has access to an emotional depth not usually associated with satire. Its range is as wide as it could ever be.

More dutch tilts shortly!