The Man Between

James Mason - Ivo Kern
Claire Bloom - Susanne Mallison
Hildegard Neff - Bettina Mallison
Geoffrey Toone - Martin Mallison
Aribert Waescher - Halendar
Ernst Schroeder - Olaf Kastner
Dieter Krause - Horst

With The Man Between (1953), Carol Reed seemed to be trying to pull in his horns. In The Man Between, he retreated to his biggest hit, The Third Man, to rummage about for new ideas, to see what could be recycled. Some scholars characterise the script as an original screenplay (by Walter Ebert and Harry Kurnitz), others as Kurnitz's adaptation of a novel by Ebert, Susanne in Berlin. Whatever the case, neither man could be expected to equal Greene's achievement. Reed's attempt at creative backtracking led him to a setting ravaged post-war Berlin - that unmistakably paralleled the decadent Viennese locale of The Third Man. Like so many of Reed's movies, the exteriors for The Man Between were shot on location. A meticulously realistic backdrop was always one of Reed's goals, and he filmed some scenes a mere ten minutes from the East German Volkspolizei, who constitute an important feature of the movie.

As in The Third Man, the city is an integral part of the drama, a recognisable force, as well as a symbol of the lives it encapsulates. The demoralisation of life in a defeated and pillaged nation is suggested vividly by Desmond Dickinson's camera, which dispassionately surveys the decay of bombed-out buildings, the vacant lots and the omnipresent rubble of Berlin. The citizens are a desperate breed, with moods ranging from desolate to cynical to agitated. Naturally corruption is as intrinsic a feature of life in Berlin as in Vienna. The plot deals with political factions who traffic in human life, which is presented as one manifestation of the frenzied intrigues between East and West, whose trench-coated agents kidnap people from one another's zones. The point of view through which all this is perceived is that of Suzanne (Bloom), an impulsive but demure English girl whose arrival in Britain to visit her brother Martin (Geoffrey Toone) and his German wife Bettina (Neff) sets the story in motion. Through her eyes we see the squalor of the city, as the camera, casually inspecting the airport on Suzanne's arrival, discovers a boy picking through garbage and a malevolent looking clown. The heroine is -picked up by Bettina, who soon establishes herself as another victim of the city; she alternates between states of depression and nervousness, though we aren't told why. Perhaps the teenage boy (Dieter Kraus) whom Suzanne notices spying on her house has something to do with it.

On the movie's melodramatic level, all these displays of tension and decay function as portents, informing the moviegoer that something is up. Berlin, like Vienna, is too dangerous a city to be merely a giant municipal ward for battle-scarred Germans. As The Third Man had its enigmatic Harry Lime, so The Man Between has a shadowy figure named Ivo (Mason). He is acquainted with Bettina, who is afraid of him for reasons that are not explained for quite some time, and he is highly attentive to Suzanne, again for reasons that are unclear. In The Third Man, Lime had three sinister confederates; here they are compressed into one bulky Berliner, Halendar (Aribert Waescher), who typifies the sleaziness of his city. He is involved in racketeering, eventually we learn that Halendar is blackmailing Ivo, who has a criminal past, and is forcing him to aid in a kidnapping attempt on Kastner (Ernest Schroeder), whose success at spiriting refugees out of East Berlin has outraged the Communist authorities. To do his part, Ivo has his own blackmail victim, Bettina, who was once Ivo's wife and is legally still married to him.

As in earlier Reed films, there is a naïf at the centre, or near the centre, of the action in The Man Between - Suzanne, whose ingenuous, school-girl approach to misery and evil seems incongruous in post-war Berlin. She is attracted to the suave, cosmopolitan Ivo and the two engage in a number of dialogues in which youthful idealism, on the one side, and mature scepticism on the other clash again and again. Suzanne is the product of a victorious nation, one that was not even invaded, while Ivo, a former lawyer who is now a minor criminal, is the disenchanted son of a brutally defeated people. At great personal risk Ivo helps Suzanne escape from Halendar's lair after she has been mistaken for Bettina and kidnapped. The latter part of the film is a familiar drama of flight as the two - now lovers, more or less - try frantically to avoid capture by the East Germans as they slip in and out of a number of grimy refuges on their way to West Berlin and freedom. In a very uncharacteristic moment of sentimentality, Reed turns his hero inside out in order to have him lay down his life to save Suzanne.

This failure of nerve and imagination in the handling of Ivo is all too typical of The Man Between, which seems like a sketch for a good movie, a decent first draft. Unhappily, the scenario mainly serves to reveal the extent to which Reed was dependent on the quality of the script he was given, regardless of his own sometimes enormous creative input. After a decade or so of increasingly impressive films, movies that displayed a skilful entertainer as well as a man of great sensibility, Reed had directed a film in which, despite creative control, he had delivered an unfulfilling work. Kurnitz simply did not have the sensitivity, the flair and the sneaky wit of Graham Greene. A screenwriter with twenty years' experience, he had also written detective novels under the name Marco Page. As a scenarist, however, his talent was most abundant in comedy and mystery-comedy, not in the sort of hard-nosed thrillers which depend on firmness of construction and a powerful sense of ambience.