writers_reign Tepid Cold War melodrama with Carol Reed making a half-hearted attempt to replicate The Third Man. The biggest problem is that none of the principals appear to be committed to the project so that the overall impression is that all the main personnel - writer, director, actors - owed the Production company a picture and were just discharging their obligation. Every time something of interest pops up - Mason and Neff arguing as Bloom walks in on them - it is immediately diffused so that little or no mystery/tension is left and we are looking at a damp squib. Usually the name of Harry Kurnitz on the credits is a guarantee of a decent script but not, alas, on this occasion. Disappointing all round.

clanciai "The Man Between" has been unfavorably compared with Carol Reed's earlier masterpieces like "Odd Man Out" and "The Third Man" which is an injustice, because this is an entirely different story and much more romantic at that. Of course, in this gloomy film of Stalinist oppression and commie commissar thugs in Berlin under the snow in the dreariness of a harrowed world capital of which nothing remains but a mutilated ghost cleft in twain, you miss certain more picturesque atmospheres of Ireland and Vienna, and there is no comedy here, although James Mason has a few dry and bitter laughs. His personification of what once was a man before the war turned into an abyss of cynical resignation is up to his best standards as an actor, and he is excellently partnered by the lovely Claire Bloom, who later returned to a similar play-acting in Berlin in Martin Ritt's hauntingly sinister "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" twelve years later, which borrowed much of the moods in this film. What's especially haunting here is John Addison's spooky music dominated by a single saxophone constantly repeating the same wailing fragment of a tune, which adds a certain metaphysical interest to this film lacking in Carol Reed's earlier ones. The flight among the ruins and the skeleton of the macabre building construction adds to the nightmarish mood of alienation in an hostilely inhuman world going futuristic in an 1984 manner - the constantly repeated threatening giant posters of Stalin everywhere in East Berlin stresses this point and adds to the helplessness of disoriented man. I saw this film now for the third time since 1971, and each time I have found it more interesting. There are some flaws in the script, not everything is clear, and especially in the beginning the audience is thrown into total confusion until Hildegard Knef at last answers some questions. Her part is perhaps the most vital to the story, she has been married to a wonderful man lost in the war, who suddenly reappears as a ghost from the ruins after the world when she has found a new happy marriage, which unwelcome revisit from the past turns her life upside down. Of course, Claire Bloom is also confused by her upset condition. The intrigue is humanly very complicated but the more interesting for its infected labyrinths, which is one of the reasons why it will always be worth while seeing this film once again.

blanche-2 James Mason is "The Man Between" in this 1953 Carol Reed film, shot on location in post-war Berlin. The film also stars Claire Bloom and Hildegarde Neff. Bloom plays Susanne, a young American woman who comes to Berlin to visit her brother Martin. Martin is stationed there and married to Bettina (Neff). Bettina is clearly unhappy about something, and Susanne soon realizes that her discomfiture has to do with a mysterious man, Iwo (Mason), described as an old friend. When Iwo offers to show her the sights, Susanne accepts, and, believing him to be having an affair with her sister-in-law, advises him to leave her alone. Iwo says he is trying to leave the area, and a friend of Martin's can help by getting him the required documents and introductions. When Susanne asks her brother to help Iwo by contacting the man, Bettina loses her temper, and the truth about Iwo and his true relationship to Bettina emerges.This is an odd, moody, dark film with some haunting images of the destroyed Berlin, and some beautiful shots, particularly the very last one in the film which stays in one's memory. The serenely beautiful Claire Bloom and the enigmatic Mason are magic together and make this a poignant love story, and very typical Reed - the innocent who has her eyes opened, the man tainted by sin going to meet his fate. The whole last half of the film focuses on only the two of them, and we sense their isolation, an odd couple in a changing world.The German supporting cast is excellent, particularly Neff, whose career in Hollywood was brief. She wrote a wonderful best-selling autobiography, The Gift Horse, in 1970, which leaves no doubt of her feelings about the place. She went on to star in Silk Stockings on Broadway and eventually returned to Germany.Quite a beautiful film, not up to "The Third Man," but still has the touch of the master.

st-shot Carol Reed keeps the post-war intrigue alive for the most part with his Odd Man Out lead James Mason in this trifle uneven and occasionally slow suspense film that strongly resembles the director's magnificent Third Man.Londoner Sussane Mallison (Claire Bloom) visits her serviceman brother and his wife in war torn Berlin. It isn't long before she suspects Bettina (Hildergard Neff) her sister in law of some type of deception. When she meets the mysterious Ivo Kern she is drawn into the action further, conflicted by the fact he is an extortionist and she is romantically drawn to him.Reed does a good job of keeping the audience in the dark for a good deal of the film with Mason and Neff both convincingly ambiguous and Bloom as innocent and confused as Holly Martins. The devastated Berlin backdrop with the ubiquitous visage of Stalin in the Eastern sector provide grim atmospherics with cinematographer Dietrich Dikisson ably filling in for Reed regular DP Robert Krasker.The editing which is a touch sloppy occasionally bogs the story down and the music score at times can be torturous to listen to but Mason's tragic turn as the cornered Kern never allows the film to fall into bathos for too long. He is the German version of the angry young man that would permeate film throughout the fifties and into the sixties and as The Man Between he is an eloquent spokesman in conveying the devastating disappointment of a generation betrayed by its government.