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Odd Man Out is an extraordinarily ambitious movie. Director Carol (The Stars Look Down) Reed has a sensitive, often inspired eye for people and for cities, and Robert (Henry V) Krasker is one of the best cameramen alive. For perhaps its first hour, their film has excitement enough to oversupply any dozen merely "good" pictures. An outstanding achievement: the film paints a melancholy, multitudinous portrait of a night city. Yet its beauty is at times so profuse and lovingly planned that it weighs the film down much as over-descriptive prose harms a novel. And the story, after a stunning start, branches and overextends itself and gradually loses contact with humanity. The hero is so near death that he hardly exists as either man or dramatic force; he becomes merely a passive symbol of doomed suffering. James Mason, though rich in glamor, rather embraces than combats the character's monotony. And some of the people he meets (vividly performed by Abbey Players) are even less human and more allegorical than he.
Dostoevskian in conception and design, the story progressively becomes more wildly adventurous, more mystical, more half-baked. But even in its failures, Odd Man Out is admirable. It is a reckless, head-on attempt at greatness, and the attempt frequently succeeds.