Carol Reed

The greatest director in the world, for about three years

Carol Reed is the strongest case in British cinema for the proposition that a career can be justified by a single decade — even a single film. Screenonline's verdict, that for a brief stretch in the late 1940s Reed was "perhaps what some earlier critics had claimed him to be: the greatest director in the world," is not hyperbole so much as an accurate description of a very narrow window. Before it he was a reliable studio hand; after it, a for-hire craftsman on other people's spectacles. Inside it he made three films that still define what the British thriller could be when it took its own moral shadows seriously.

Putney to the quota quickies

Born in Putney on December 30, 1906, the son of the actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Reed came to film the long way round — through the theatre. He acted on stage in his late teens, joined the thriller writer Edgar Wallace's company in 1927 as his personal assistant, and after Wallace's death in 1932 apprenticed under Basil Dean at Associated Talking Pictures as dialogue and second-unit director. He began directing in 1935 with quota quickies like Midshipman Easy (1935); Graham Greene, then reviewing for The Spectator, judged that Reed "has more sense of the cinema than most veteran British directors." The Stars Look Down (1940) proved the point on a serious subject.

Then the peak. Odd Man Out (1947), The Fallen Idol (1948) — the last two from Greene screenplays, the beginning of one of the great writer-director partnerships — and The Third Man (1949), which took the Grand Prix at Cannes and which the British Film Institute later voted the greatest British film of the 20th century. He was knighted in 1952, only the second British film director so honoured. The Academy Award for Best Director came late and for a different kind of film entirely: the musical Oliver! (1968), after earlier nominations for The Fallen Idol and The Third Man had gone unrewarded.

What the numbers say

Our library ranks Reed #64 among all directors, composite 11.36 across ten films — and that figure is almost entirely one film's doing. The Third Man sits at #9 overall (6.08, cited by 14 of our sources), one of the highest single-film placements in the whole database. Everything else falls off a cliff: Oliver! is next at #425 (1.91), and after that nothing cracks the top thousand — Odd Man Out at #1289, The Fallen Idol at #1865, Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) down at #2751. The shape is unmistakable and, to my eye, fair: Reed is a director the aggregate treats as the author of one imperishable masterpiece and a long tail of competent professional work. The reputation and the arithmetic agree.

Where to start

The Third Man, obviously — the one film here that carries the greatest-British-film title without argument. Then The Fallen Idol, the quieter of the Greene collaborations, for proof that the peak was a body of work and not a fluke.