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A drama of light and darkness, from noon to midnight as the path to deliverance. "Will you ever be free?" "Someday, perhaps." Belfast and the IRA go unnamed yet the struggle is obvious, vertigo is never far from the mind of the anxious revolutionary (James Mason), he steps out the door for a robbery and the buildings quiver and wobble. He takes a bullet in the middle of the heist and a tumble out of the getaway car, a tangle of shelters, alleys, pubs and churches engulfs him. "A prize creature," everybody wants a piece. The police inspector (Denis O'Dea) is after cold justice, the priest (W.G. Fay) craves a confession and has but "a particle of faith" to offer, the bird-selling vagabond (F.J. McCormick) waits for the best offer. The bedeviled painter (Robert Newton) needs dying eyes for his canvases and finds them in the fugitive bleeding in the atelier, just a brush between men lost in obsessive searches. "He's doomed!" "So are we all." Ford's The Informer holds stylistic sway, shadow and rain and snow blur in the glistening corrosion of a very long Irish night. Carol Reed's city is a lugubrious panorama teeming with acerbic cameos, even the compassionate are afraid to get involved. (Mason's advice to the nurses who take him in: "Close the door when I'm gone, and forget me.") The older generation warns against the folly of being in love with a rebel, still the adoring accomplice (Kathleen Ryan) ventures into the maze with pistol in hand. A most polished Calvary for Mason, the still center of the Dickensian whirlpool until a verse from Corinthians triggers one last spasm of revelation, shot from a long angle to catch the saliva dangling from his lip. The climax departs from Pépé le Moko, Wajda's war trilogy bespeaks a close study. Cinematography by Robert Krasker. With Cyril Cusack, William Hartnell, Fay Compton, Elwyn Brook-Jones, Robert Beatty, and Dan O'Herlihy. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |