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1 article from 2009

3 February 2009 6:55 AM, PST | ifc.com | See recent IFC news »

By Michael Atkinson

Filmmaking is all about collaboration and fortuity, as much as we genuflect faithfully to the sacredness of the auteur. Take Carol Reed -- a career that spanned almost four decades, encompassing 33 features, and yet only a few are memorable (not, God knows, his late-career Oscar-winner "Oliver!"). Essentially, Reed finds his way onto the pantheon's higher shelves on the strength of only a handful of films, starting with the trio of startling, precise, infinitely rich features he made in the late '40s, one after the other -- "Odd Man Out" (1947), "The Fallen Idol" (1948) and "The Third Man" (1949) -- and ending a little less auspiciously with "Our Man in Havana" (1959). The rogue factor here is that three out of the four were written by Graham Greene, whose particular ironic-tension story skills gave many a medium-boil filmmaker his best shot at sublimity. The first three -- certainly one of »

- Michael Atkinson

1 article from 2009