Carol Reed Stills & Poster Gallery

Reed, Carol (1906-1976)

Carol Reed is one of the finest directors of his generation, whose best work was between the mid to late forties. Reed was a very intuitive director whose own life inform many of his characters. Arguably, Reed's films are deeply personal and often deal with loss and separation that ultimately lead to isolation and death. This somewhat dark viewpoint led critic Raymond Durgnat to classify Reed as "the most imposing pessimist of the British Cinema" (1971). Reed's characters frequently occupy a twilight zone, a world of uncertainty and doubt, characters like Johnny McQueen in Odd Man Out 1947 or Holly Martins in The Third Man 1949 are at odds with themselves or their surroundings. The appropriately titled 1965 film The Agony and the Ecstasy explores the relationship between the artist Michelangelo and patron Pope Julius II of Rome in a struggle for creative freedom.

The staging of a number of his films in foreign or crime settings such as The Third Man enable Reed to occupy a world of disillusionment and pathos, whose characters often fall into a trap or become misguided by folly as we see with Willems in Outcast of the Islands 1952. Harry Lime in The Third Man occupies an underworld of sewers and vice and exploits post war shortages in Vienna to the point of misleading friends and dishonoring himself, which are close to Reed's own heart to reveal a complex nature and a brilliant mind at work.

Nigel Arthur, BFI Stills Curator