Carol Reed - The Bigger Picture

by Charles Drazin

My first book The Finest Years: British Cinema of the 1940s was written - nearly ten years ago now - as a tribute to a British film culture that was then rather lost in Hollywood's shadow. It also seemed to me much misunderstood and denigrated because it did not produce the European-style auteur films that a generation of critics who came to the fore during the 1960s so prized. More than any other director I can think of, Carol Reed captures the collaborative nature of the British cinema at its very best. He saw himself as a 'craftsman' rather than an 'artist', but in orchestrating the talents of other supremely gifted individuals, whether writers, actors, musicians or cameramen, he achieved some of the most memorable films in international cinema history.

Intuitive rather than intellectual, Reed would not have regarded himself as having had 'something to say'; his job was to realize in images on the screen the work of an author - whether that author was Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad or even Lionel Bart. But his innate sense of humanity and pathos, his eye for the telling, incidental detail and his ability to achieve a perfect blend of documentary realism and drama make the films he directed unmistakably his films. The fact that they were other people's films too is only further cause to celebrate the centenary of one of the greatest exponents of the cinema as a collaborative medium.

The novelist Graham Greene called Reed "the only director I know with that particular warmth of human sympathy, the extraordinary feeling for the right face for the right part, the exactitude of cutting, and not least important the power of sympathizing with an author's worries and an ability to guide him". That guidance went hand in hand with an open-mindedness that encouraged his collaborators to make some of their most brilliant contributions to the cinema.

This genius for releasing other people's genius was responsible for not only Greene's finest work in the cinema, but also - just to give the examples that come most immediately to mind - the extraordinary night-time photography of cinematographer Robert Krasker, the poignant and unforgettable performance of the eight-year-old Bobby Henrey in The Fallen Idol, the iconic zither music of Anton Karas - which, doubtless, people will still be humming when it is time to celebrate Reed's bicentenary.

Although I first wrote about Carol Reed in The Finest Years, I found myself returning to him again in two subsequent books, In Search of The Third Man (1999) and Korda: Britain's Only Movie Mogul (2002). A vital and very pleasant part of researching all three books involved consulting the special collections of the BFI Library. The existence of the London Films Productions archive but also Carol Reed's own papers made it possible to go beyond the distortions and Chinese whispers of other writers to touch the historical reality.

Certainly, I do not think In Search of The Third Man would have been written without the discovery of key pieces of material in the special collections that made it clear one could get to the very heart of a famous film's production - from Graham Greene's agreement with London Films in January 1948 for 'an original post-war continental story' to Carol Reed's own notes on his and Greene's script conferences with David Selznick eight months later.

But what I remember most from my research is not so much the many fascinating documents as a rough little cartoon sketch that Reed had placed in his own scrapbook of newspaper cuttings. Drawn in pencil by some anonymous hand, it depicted Reed looming over a perspiring Anton Karas and drawing from him, with his conductor's baton, brilliance on a zither. A caption in large, smudged letters read: 'PORTRAIT OF A ZITHER PLAYER UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF SVENGALI REED'. I hoped that the presence of Carol Reed's papers might exert a similar effect on me, but even if not I took some comfort from the fact that this little sketch would remain safe in the collection to capture the essence of the man for other researchers who might follow.