Svengali Reed

A good story tells itself. The job of the writer or director is then to recognise what the story is and to coax it into the world. The extraordinary skill with which Carol Reed accomplished this feat is, I think, the main reason why The Third Man was so successful. He got the very best out of a good story just as he got the very best out of a good zither player.

Of all the interviews I did when I wrote my book about The Third Man, the most complete and informative was that of Guy Hamilton. Most known today as the director of four Bond films, including, arguably, the very best of them all, Goldfinger, Guy had been Reed’s assistant on The Third Man but also the film that Reed had made before, The Fallen Idol, which is every bit as accomplished, if much less talked about.

After I had interviewed him, Guy was very concerned to emphasize the importance of the man who been his mentor in the film business, which he didn’t think he had brought out strongly enough. So some weeks after we had met – in Andratx, Mallorca, where Guy was spending a happy retirement with his Bond fortune playing golf – he sent me a letter to emphasise the point. “In trying to do justice to Carol Reed, I would like to add a couple of thoughts,” he began, before then continuing a letter which contained many more than a couple of thoughts.

I don’t want to get in the way of that letter, which is best left to speak for itself, but there are two people who need a brief introduction. Basil Dean, whom Guy mentions in the first paragraph, was a rather autocratic theatre impressario, who, with the coming of sound in the late 1920s, established a production company called Associated Talking Pictures. It would later change its name to Ealing Studios, and it was where Carol Reed first rose to prominence as a film-maker. “Alex”, mentioned in the last paragraph, was the great British movie impresario Sir Alexander Korda. He was the fairy godfather of The Third Man: his essential contribution was to make sure that Carol Reed was free to make the film in exactly the way that he thought best:

All the really fine US directors of that period, Hathaway, Wyler Hawks etc., all started as prop men, gag writers, assistants, etc. And Carol was no exception. He was an excellent assistant to Basil Dean, learnt how to handle him, down to imitating his peculiar voice, which came in very useful when he could call up departments pretending to be Dean and get instant results. So successful was this ploy that Carol wrote and directed Talk of the Devil which was based on the idea.

Carol learnt his trade in quota quickies, and all the essential tricks that go with it. How to shoot six pages a day. How to lay tracks, stage a scene in one take to get yourself out of trouble and stay on schedule. He was proud of this knowledge and occasionally still used it. (David Lean from the cutting room would not know what he was talking about.)

Having paid the entrance fee, Carol could now take his time, concentrate, but was never, never indulgent. As an ex-AD, he despised Lean’s time-wasting shenanigans.

Carol’s humour was wonderfully gentle, offbeat, looking to make weddings sad, funerals funny but always with the lightest of touches. He was always very wary of pushing a laugh.

He did live on cloud nine, often seeming to be somewhere else, but he knew perfectly well what was going on. He could afford to let those around him take care of mundane matters.

Physically not very co-ordinated or sporty except for a love of cricket. An intense dislike, not to say fear, of heights. But he loved high-angle shots. Consequently the camera would go up on top of some rickety rostrums and I would watch Carol force himself up a wooden ladder, across some scaffolding and up another pair of steps to check the set-up. He would descend, covered in sweat and shaking. Very brave.

Carol needed whatever a good producer gave him. He was never the same after the death of Alex. There was nobody about to guide him in choice of material. I saw him in Hollywood whilst he was making Agony and Ecstasy. Very unhappy. Hollywood is a producers’ town and Carol could never cope with that horrendous breed.

Funnily enough once he comes back to Europe and John Woolf –a financial and distribution expert and a gentleman – lets him loose on Oliver! and never dreams of being anything but supportive and non-interfering, everything is sunshine again.

Guy Hamilton, Puerto Andratx, Mallorca, 10 July 1998