Reed makes a peculiar and interesting choice right at the outset, as the “accident” occurs. It’s been well established by this point in the film (about 40 minutes in) that Mason is extremely weak, and it’s clear that the lorry doesn’t actually hit him—he just stumbles backward a bit, then sinks to the ground from sheer exhaustion. But the idea is that the two ladies, from their vantage point across the road, think they see him get sideswiped. From their point of view, the geometry makes sense. (Though it’s tough to see precisely where they’re meant to be, as they aren’t visible beyond Mason until they go running toward him.) It would look to them like a hit-and-run. Thing is, though, viewers have to perform that act of mental projection, because Reed doesn’t provide a shot from the women’s point of view. Instead, he offers two shots from the lorry driver’s point of view, emphasizing not the illusion that Mason’s been hit—ostensibly the point—but the danger that he’s going to be hit. Reed lets the dialogue do the dirty work (“He’s hit him!”) in order to visually underline the film’s central concern: Mason’s fate is in the hands of ordinary working folk, who may or may not choose to swerve in time.

Once the women get him inside, the scene takes a turn that seems quintessentially British. Both Maureen (Ann Clery) and Maudie (Beryl Measor) are right proud of the first-aid techniques they learned in the ARP, which stands for Air Raid Precautions. Mason collapses into a chair and the ladies start squabbling over the nature of Mason’s injury, over who knows better what steps ought to be taken (“You know darn well you failed in your practicals”), over the ethics of cutting up somebody’s clothes without first asking permission, and so forth. This sort of light-comic duo was a staple of British cinema at the time, dating back (at least) to the cricket-obsessed Charters and Caldicott in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes; occasionally, as in that film, such characters would even get involved in the action. But the abrupt shift here from jocular needling to grave concern serves a different function entirely. I especially love the way Maureen, the more assertive of the two, responds to her first sight of the gunshot wound by unconsciously fondling her wedding ring, as if already thinking of what will happen when her husband arrives. (He shows up right after this clip ends, and ultimately allows Mason to head out on his own.)

Note that even after they see the bullet hole in Mason’s arm, the women continue as long as they can with the pretense that his injury was caused by the truck. “I shouldn’t like to interfere with that,” Maureen tells Maudie, essentially speaking in code—she’s supposedly referring to the wound, but the language she chooses is odd. A wound isn’t something one interferes with; an undeclared war is. Only when Maureen finds the gun in Mason’s coat pocket is she forced to openly acknowledge that they have the leader of “The Organization” in their parlor. And though Odd Man Out isn’t really Mason’s story, it still helps the film to have a first-rate actor as a barely conscious fulcrum. He has two amazing non-verbal moments here: his amused, exasperated response when Maureen asks him if he’s talking about his wife (it’s his girlfriend, whom he’s reluctant to marry because of the cause), and that tiny, apprehensive furrow of the brow when he sees Maureen put her hand in his pocket and knows she’s about to find the gun. But I can’t emphasize enough, for those who’ve never seen the movie, that Mason is unusually animated in this scene, compared to most of the other scenes in which he appears. That’s how incapacitated he is.

The saddest part of this unexpected meeting, however, is prefigured by the last words spoken in the clip: “Did that fellow die? Did I kill him?” Mason shot a man during the robbery (the very man who shot him first), but he doesn’t yet know at this point if the man survived, as he understandably didn’t stick around. This is the third time he’s asked someone the question, and the third time it hasn’t been answered. Everybody knows, but nobody will tell him. Their reluctance seems motivated by how obviously Mason wants the answer to be “no”—not out of concern for his own hide, but just out of human decency. (It’s strongly suggested that the gun went off accidentally during a struggle.) Right after this clip ends, however, Maureen’s husband comes home, recognizes Mason, and drags the women into the kitchen to discuss what’s to be done. And it’s from their heated argument, heard through a closed door, that Mason finally discovers that’s he’s a murderer. I don’t know whether the choice to have that revelation overheard rather than directly conveyed was Reed’s or novelist-screenwriter F.L. Green’s, but either way, it was a masterstroke. Much like Maureen’s rhetorical plea—“Why should I be the one to bring you in?”—it underscores the frequently random nature of life’s most crucial moments, as well as the unbridgeable gulf between Mason and the people whose freedom he claims to be fighting for. It took some foolhardy nerve to structure those ideas around a movie star who’s little more than furniture in his own movie.