The Man Between [Blu-ray]

Director: Carol Reed Carol Reed

Overview

Set in grim, gray post-WW II Berlin, a former attorney turned black marketeer makes extra money by enticing West Germans to join the communists in East Germany

Product Details

Release Date:	11/05/2019
UPC:	0738329240301
Original Release:	1953
Rating:	NR
Source:	Kl Studio Classics
Region Code:	A
Presentation:	[B&W]
Sound:	[DTS 5.1-Channel Surround Sound]
Language:	English
Time:	1:42:00
Sales rank:	34,725

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

James Mason	Ivo Kern
Claire Bloom	Susan Mallinson
Geoffrey Toone	Martin
Dieter Krause	Horst
Hildegard Knef	Bettina Mallinson
Hilde Sessak	Lizzi
Ernst Schröder	Kastner
Karl John	Inspector Kleiber
Aribert Wäscher	Halendar
Eberhard Fechner	Actor
Reinhard Kolldehoff	Actor
Hildegarde Neff	Bettina Mallinson
Ernst Schroeder	Olaf Kastner
Albert Waescher	Halendar
Ljuba Welitsch	Singer
John Addison	Composer

Technical Credits

Harry Kurnitz

Walter Ebert

Eric Linklater

Carol Reed	Director,Producer
Harry Kurnitz	Screenwriter
Walter Ebert	Screenwriter
Eric Linklater	Screenwriter
Buster Ambler	Sound Effects
Red Law	Sound Effects

Editorial Reviews

Carol Reed wanted to work with James Mason, with whom he'd had one of his greatest triumphs (on Odd Man Out), and so he took on The Man Between, based on a story by Graham Greene. And the combination of Reed and Greene, which had worked so well in The Third Man, comes off nearly as well on The Man Between. The setting is postwar Berlin rather than Vienna, however, and political conditions in the city forced Reed to abandon his location shooting midway through. The results are still impressive visually and stylistically, even though the cast isn't as seamless in their performances as the players in The Third Man were. Hildegarde Neff's character isn't sufficiently well defined in the first half of the movie, and Claire Bloom's Susanna Mallison goes through a transformation midway through that stretches some credibility, from wide-eyed innocent and romantic fool to hard-edged cynic, though still with an attraction to James Mason's Ivo Kern. The main problem is Mason, whose performance is excellent but who is so obviously a non-native German speaker -- especially glaring when he is working in a scene with German actors -- that it destroys some of the carefully constructed mood of whatever sequence is involved, at least until the end, when this becomes a chase drama, and pure suspense takes over. Oddly enough, rather than recalling The Third Man, which was obviously in the minds of the producers and distributors, The Man Between ends up anticipating some elements of Martin Ritt's The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, made a dozen years later (and also co-starring Bloom).