The Third Man (1949)
I got married recently to a wonderful woman from Ibaraki called Satomi. Mozart buffs that we both are, there was no place we would rather marry than Salzburg, his birthplace, and, since we would already be in Europe, we decided to travel around the continent for our honeymoon. Leaving Salzburg, our first stop was Vienna, a marvelous city in which, amidst all the beautiful, historical buildings, lavishing palaces and breathtaking cathedrals, a small cinema caught my attention, for prominently displayed by its entrance was a poster advertising a noir-looking movie called The Third Man, featuring none other than Orson "Citizen Kane" Welles himself! Intrigued, I jokingly asked the ticket clerk (in my poor man's German) why such an old movie would be top-billed alongside this year's releases, to which he replied that that movie had been playing there even before he was born (!). "A great look into post-WWII Vienna", he said enthusiastically. Needless to say, I had been hooked - even though I didn't remember at the time that this movie was not only in Ebert's Great Movies list, but was also considered by him to be one of the ten best movies of all time. My wife, on the other hand, was keener on the idea of being able to rest for a couple of hours after all we had walked that day, and, because of that, even though she cannot speak English, she agreed to watch the movie with me. After buying our tickets from the now visibly euphoric clerk, we were escorted by him to the charmingly old-fashioned Großer Saal, where we proceeded to the center seat in the 2nd flood balcony (which offered the best view of the screen). The lights soon started to dim; my wife fell asleep on my shoulder shortly after, leaving me alone to savor the delicious popcorn we had smuggled into the cinema. And then, as the cheerful sound of a string instrument I had never heard before filled the room, I reclined smirkingly on my chair, certain that I was in for an amazing experience -- and I didn't leave the cinema disappointed.
Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) was brimming with expectation as his train arrived in Vienna that day. After having struggled for money for a long time, barely making a living as a pulp Western novel writer, he had come at the invitation of his long time friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles), who had promised him a job and a place to stay. His hopes and dreams are brought to a halt, however, upon discovering that Harry had died just the day before, in a tragic automobile accident. With no place to go, Holly decides to pay his last respects to his friend, meeting, at the cemetery, a man he will soon discover to be Major Calloway (Trevor Howard). Over a bottle of gin, Calloway tells him that Harry, lowlife criminal that he was, was better off dead. Angered at the accusation, Holly decides to clear his friend's name, starting by piecing together the suspicious circumstances of his death. Along the way, he meets Harry's former lover, Anna (Alida Valli), still madly in love with Harry, the man that made her life bearable after the War had ended. Being her passport discovered to be a forgery, she finds herself in trouble with the police, one more unjust victim of the system in Holly's eyes, who then decides to help her. After being chased by a shadowy group of men bent on ending his quest for answers, Holly is advised by Anna to go to Major Calloway for help. Under the circumstances, Calloway, fearing for Holly's life, decides to present him the case he has against Harry, a man, Holly thus realizes, who used to run a black-market dealership of adulterated penicillin, whose users became then crippled, mad or ended up dying. Devastated, Holly tells Anna all he had learned, but she ignores him for loving Harry so much. "A person doesn't change because you found out more", she says. In love with her, he can't make himself push the matter any further, leaving her room into the night and meeting, to his surprise, the same Harry Lime whose very death he is trying solve! Harry runs away, but later agrees to meet Holly in a ferris wheel for a brief talk. "Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, why should we? They talk about people and the proletariat; I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It's the same thing.", Harry states nonchalantly to his old friend, who is baffled at his coldheartedness. Upon being taken to the children's hospital where some of Harry's victims lie dying, Holly is persuaded by Major Calloway to serve as bait to help in Harry's capture. Anna, recognizing the ploy, confronts Holly at the place he and the police had set their ambush, urging Harry to run away upon his arrival. After a tense chase in the sewers, Harry is wounded by the police, and Holly sees himself in the place of having to fire the final shot. On the way back from his friend's second funeral, Holly waits in the main street for Anna to pass him by; she does so, without even glancing at his direction.
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| Harry Lime's ensemble of friends. Notice the contrast between his old friend, the childlike Holly, and his suspicious-looking new acquaintances. | |||||||||||
Director Carol Reed chose to preamble his movie with a long close-up shot of a zither, the sole instrument in the movie's soundtrack, as it is being played, thus making sure we were familiarized with the frisky, almost mocking sound it makes before introducing us the fool being mocked: an overly optimistic Holly Martins (played by Welles' Citizen Kane co-star Joseph Cotten), who, soon after arriving in Vienna, proceeds to forebodingly walk under a ladder. Holly, we will son come to know, has an extremely simplistic view of the world, mirrored in the pulp novels he writes, set in an idealized Old West where good guys have no character flaws and bad guys are the embodiment of pure evil. Such Manichaeism will be the main driving force in his "lone ranger" crusade to clear his old pal Harry Lime's good name, tainted, he believes, by Major Calloway's baseless allegations. Such naiveté is blatantly derided by Reed from the very moment Holly sets out on his investigation: as he meets each one of Harry's new friends, both characters are constantly framed either in close-ups or medium-close shots, contrasting in this way Holly's trusting, childlike expression to their shifty and suspicious grins - hence telegraphing to the audience that those men are not to be trusted, and, indirectly, Holly's blindness to that fact. His morals are badly shaken, however, after a long talk with Major Calloway and a subsequent meeting with Harry himself - now a coldblooded criminal. By the end of his quest, Holly will indeed have helped dismantle a heinous black market of deadly, adulterated penicillin, but, contrary to the heroes in his novels, he will also have paid a high price for it, by having been forced to fire the shot that killed his oldest friend, the woman he loves despise him, and his naïve perception of the world changed forever.
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| Harry Lime (Orson Welles) |
Harry Lime, on the other hand, is a much more complex man, whose morals are lax enough that he was able to find a way to exploit the pain and the suffering of the aftermath of WWII for his own personal gain. He does not care about the deadly side-effects of the adulterated penicillin he sells in the black market, choosing instead to view his victims merely as "expendable dots worth 20,000 pounds each", as he coldly puts it to Holly. Insensitive as it may seem, when trying to convince his old friend that what he is doing is indeed justifiable, Harry does make a sound point, by comparing his disdainful view of the common people to how governments regard their citizens (a topic that resonates specially in times of war). His contempt for the average man is, however, juxtaposed to how much he cares about his friends - Holly included. Upon telling Holly he has been living in the Soviet zone, acting as an informant in exchange to not being taken to the British police in Vienna to be judged by his crimes, Holly immediately inquired whether Harry was, then, the cause for the police scrutiny on Anna, to which he neither confirmed nor denied, instead reiterating his lack of concern with a "what can I do, old man? I'm dead, ain't I!". Nevertheless, we know he was about to go to her apartment the night before, certainly to comfort her, being prevented by Holly being there - culminating in what Ebert called "the most dramatic entrance in the history of the cinema". Orson Welles manages to bring an eerily natural cynicism to the part of Harry Lime, cynicism that, to some extent, mirrored Welles's own approach to the movie, for it is now known that he only took the part to help finance his Othello (1952). Likewise, given his prima donna attitude during filming, forcing director Reed to build a replica of the set in England to shoot most of his scenes, one may wonder whether he was worth all the trouble. Yet, since the movie's most memorable scenes all belong to Welles, and its most quotable speech was the one improvised by him, it is evident that, in the end, Reed's patience toward him was more than repaid.
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| Anna (Alida Valli) |
Reed and Selznick not always agreed on the treatment of Greene's script, however, with the director battling the producer all the way to the movie release date. Luckily for Reed, Selznick was not the only one financing the the film, with Alexander Korda, the co-producer, normally favoring Reed whenever a dispute between the two would arise. In that way, Reed was able, among other things, to set aside Selznick’s politicization of the film (by discarding scenes that would have painted the Soviets as the villains of the story), to shoot on location and not on set (something Ebert deemed crucial in his review), and to base the movie's entire score on the work of Anton Karas, an unknown player of an unknown musical instrument (making the theme song of the movie one of the biggest hits of 1950) - each one of them changes that time and audiences have ruled to be on point. Unfortunately, by contract, Selznick had the final say on the US version of the film, which he made sure fitted his view of Holly being the "Sober American Hero Who Sorts Everything Out" (to paraphrase the narrator in Frederick Baker's documentary Shadowing the Third Man - 2004) - a version I sincerely don't intend to watch.
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| Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) about to tell Holly all the ghastly details on his investigation on Harry, having the tension on the scene broken in a very Hitchcockian way |
An accomplished screenwriter and novelist (being once shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature), Graham Greene was also known for his loathing of Alfred Hitchcock's films, once stating that they "merely convey[ed] a series of small, 'amusing' melodramatic situations [...] [T]hey mean nothing; they lead to nothing". Yet, it is impossible not to notice a very strong (and perhaps subconscious) Hitchcockian influence in the way Greene employs tongue-in-cheek humor to relieve the tension building up in more serious scenes (at least in The Third Man, that is - the most critically acclaimed movie based on his work). From the cockatoo Holly mistakes by a killer chasing him, to an inopportune balloon seller who will not take a no for an answer even if his potential clients are policemen preparing an ambush, my favorite uses of comedy in the movie revolve around the fact that Holly, an American, does not speak German. At one point, for example, after having been chased all over the city for being mistaken by a murderer, he arrives hastily in his hotel, hoping to find means of transportation so that he could go to Major Calloway for help. Upon being told there is already a car waiting for him, he happily climbs into it, just to have his German-speaking driver dash away without being instructed where to go. As the car speeds through Vienna and the driver completely ignores his passenger's pleas, Holly (and the audience)'s apprehension grows: certainly the driver works for Harry's killers, and has come to silence him because he got too close to the truth, we assume. Suddenly, the driver stops, leaves the car and waits for Holly to leave as well. Holly is about to run away, when a door opens and we are shown that the driver had just taken him to a lecture on American Literature he was supposed to give, to which he was very late! (Incidentally, the lecture scene itself is very reminiscent of a similar one in Hitchcock's The 39 Steps - 1935). Reed wisely chose not to subtitle any of the German dialog in the film, thus leaving the audience as lost as Holly during his stay in Vienna. While being a highly effective strategy in increasing audience empathy toward Holly, unfortunately some very interesting secondary characters were eclipsed in the process. Take Anna's landlady (Hedwig Bleibtreu) for instance: to a non-German speaker, she provides nothing but comic relief by constantly complaining, in German, to British policemen that know nothing of the language; someone who understands her lines, however, would see in her the embodiment of the disillusioned post-war European, as she repeatedly calls to attention, in order to reinforce her demands of orderly conduct, the glorious past of her house and the gentleman-like behavior of men in old Vienna.
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| Policemen chase Harry Lime though the sewers of Vienna |
Finally, if only one single element in The Third Man had to be celebrated (as it indeed was, being recipient of the sole Oscar with which the movie was recognized), it would have to be Robert Krasker's ingenious cinematography. In order to overcome the limitations of film stock when shooting with little light, he had the inventive idea of spraying water on every inch of the filming locations, thus making Vienna constantly glisten at night and, indirectly, depicting that ravaged city in a quite dreamlike way. Furthermore, he was able to very naturally incorporate dutch angles into the narrative, to better convey the feeling of disorientation of its main characters. Vienna stands as a beacon of hope for Holly up until the very moment he knocks on Harry's door, when his world is then turned askew, as is Krasker's camera. From that moment on, Holly is plunged into the maze of oblique lines in which, through mise en scène and lighting, Viena is then transformed in his eyes, with Krasker's tilted camera making the city at times resemble a German Expressionist set. Harry, on the other hand, being comfortable in that environment, is, accordingly, always framed "properly", more than once literally blending in with his surroundings. It is only when he sees himself trapped inside the labyrinthine Vienna sewers, cornered by policemen from all sides, that Krasker then frames him with dutch angles, which, combined with the already confusing layout of the sewers, are highly effective in making the audience feel as disoriented as Harry.
By the way, my wife and I watched The Third Man again after returning to Japan, this time properly subtitled. She liked it very much.
Summarizing it:
Liked
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Didn't like
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| Orson Welles's morally ambiguous Harry Lime | Joseph Cotten is not at his most convincing when playing drunk |
| Director Carol Reed's many invaluable contributions to the film Robert Krasker's clever cinematography | |
As Stanley Kubrick would come to fathom some years later, one-point perspective shots can be quite stunning.
Great Movie review by Roger Ebert here.
If you liked this movie, then maybe try watching Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), and Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958).
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