“The Man Between, while not as intense as Odd Man Out or as richly atmospheric as The Third Man, completes Carol Reed's ambitious trilogy. Set in Berlin, it is the saddest of the three. James Mason portrays Ivor, a man whose ideals of justice and honor were demolished with the outbreak of war. A cynic, wanted by the police in the West, used as a pawn by the Russians in the East, his sole preoccupation is self-preservation at any cost. The arrival of an innocent Englishwoman (Claire Bloom) and their ensuing affair catches Ivor not only between East and West but between principle and personal survival. The film captures the demoralized quality of postwar Berlin in which even the existence of personal dreams is like some long-forgotten song. Even the tensest moments and situations in this film have a worn-out, hopeless quality, as though in the very act of survival there's no time left for life. To Ivor, who has sunk so low as to exchange other men's lives for his own, Suzanne's love for him is an alien and frightening thing. When she asks him if he ever loved his wife he replies, ‘I've forgotten.' In Carol Reed's hands Berlin becomes a city in which children are treated as adults and strangers as children, in which something as innocent as a young boy and his bike appears menacing and even vehicles embody the sinister motives of the people driving them. And you are left finally with the haunting image of Berlin: a large, old house from another era left standing among the bombed-out ruins in a strange new world.” --Diane Gysbers