Cinema Egzotik: Take Cover Night

Taking cover, lying low, going to ground: two film classics bring home the sense of being hounded like nothing else in Egzotik’s Take Cover Night. Directed by two equally classic filmmakers, Carol Reed (Odd Man Out) and John Carpenter (Assault on Precinct 13), we go on the run in Belfast, dive to dodge rounds of bullets in LA.

Egzotik programmer Martin Koolhoven explains. “Carol Reed is probably best known for his films The Third Man and Oliver!, but after tonight you”ll also add the magnificently shot and heart-wrenching Odd Man Outto your list. Screened with the coolest siege movie ever: Assault on Precinct 13 by Egzotik favourite John Carpenter.'

Odd Man Out (Carol Reed, GB, 1947, 116', black and white) The police are hunting IRA leader Johnny McQueen (James Mason), who masterminded a spectacular armed robbery. As his flight takes him through the dark streets of Belfast, the fatally wounded McQueen turns into a messiah figure for the Irish independence struggle. Excruciating tension and sweaty palms right through the end. “Best film of All Time” according to the London Sunday Chronicle, and the first recipient of the BAFTA Award for Outstanding British Film (1948). Assault on Precinct 13 (John Carpenter, US, 1976, 91”) A cult classic by John Carpenter. For his story of a man taking shelter in all but deserted police station, Carpenter drew inspiration from the “buddy motif” in Howard Hawks”s Rio Bravo (starring John Wayne). The scene this time is an understaffed police station in a run-down district of Los Angeles. Like Dutch filmmaker and film composer Dick Maas after him, Carpenter wrote the score himself.