(Please note, this contains many spoilers.)
I always love when I’m unexpectedly sent down a path that leads to an obsession. The other day I was watching a recent episode of The Simpsons (“The Man from G.R.A.M.P.A.” Season 32 Ep. 21) where they riff on the film The Third Man. They even use the main music theme from the film, a piece of music that may have been one of the first earworms. I couldn’t stop humming it for the remainder of the day and realized I needed to re-watch the film as it had been quite a long time since I’d last seen it.
Here’s Homer Simpson in the Joseph Cotten role, the naive American who is struggling to believe the worst of someone he thought he knew…
The Third Man is directed by the British director Carol Reed and takes place in postwar occupied Vienna and was released in 1949. For my money, this film is about as close to perfection as a film can get. Direction, cinematography, actors, writing, music, art direction, editing are all operational at the most refined levels.
The script was written by the great British writer Graham Greene and significantly it was based on a story written precisely for the purposes of being filmed. A novella of the story exists (and is a very enjoyable read with a few interesting differences) but all along, the motivation behind the writing was for the film. There’s no excess and nothing missing. Unlike many films based on novels where the film characters end up undeveloped or the plot is confusing because it’s impossible to include everything in an average two-hour film, this is about as tight as a film can get while still maintaining an air of mystery.
Greene was well-respected in his day as a serious writer, but he also wrote what he called “entertainments.” I suspect nowadays, his work is looked at on the whole as worthy of serious discussion but it’s important to note that he could take a complicated subject and still make it entertaining. This is not an easy trick to pull off but it’s certainly the case with The Third Man.
On the surface it’s the story of what people had to endure and how they did what they needed to do to get by after World War II had devastated Europe. The plot revolves around the death of Harry Lime, an American racketeer (played by Orson Welles), which may or may not be an accident. His friend Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) is determined to find out. But it’s also the story of how the idea of good versus evil is some pretty murky business. At what point on the gradation of good to evil does one become too evil? And what does it take to change your mind about someone you thought you knew and trusted? And it begs the question of what makes for a so-called “good war.”
Holly Martins is a hack writer who primarily writes westerns. He lives in a world of black and white where good and evil are easily identified. He is so resolutely American in his flatness. He’s very much a “what you see is what you get” kind of person which juxtaposes with his friend Harry Lime who is all mystery and shadow. Orson Welles as Harry Lime looms large over the film despite hardly any actual screen time but it’s really Joseph Cotten who carries the weight of the film. He’s the one who is forced to change the way he perceives the world and reevaluate his ostensible good friend. It’s his struggle that we all empathize with.
And of course, there has to be a love interest. Anna Schmidt is the woman in the middle of this love triangle, played by actress Alida Valli who never seemed to gain the traction she should have after this performance. Apparently she was being groomed to be the next Ingrid Bergman. This is a Hollywood foolishness I’ve never understood. Nobody else can be Ingrid Berman. They should have groomed her to be Alida Valli!
Anna is also at odds with who she thought Harry Lime was and who she learns he was in reality. We see her sleeping in oversize men’s pajamas with the monogram HL so we know the degree of intimacy they shared. (I’m a little surprised that the puritanical censors of that era let that detail through.) We understand her pain in losing Harry by the fact that she wants to be wrapped in his scent. Even at the end when she fully grasps the horrors of the crimes that Harry has committed, she can’t bring herself to completely turn on him. This puts her at odds with Martins and there’s no happy ending to be had.
Cinematographer, Robert Krasker, won the Oscar for best black-and-white cinematography —they had separate awards for color back then. While I’m not one to put a lot of stock in awards, he certainly deserved any and all accolades for this one. The film is a stunner. It’s very expressionistic and graphic. Every frame could be a painting. Ominous shadows and dark portals abound.
One of the most discussed and notable features of this film is that the camera angle is frequently askew which gives it an uneasy, deeply disturbing feeling, further emphasizing the discomfort of having to sort out who and what to trust. I kept expecting gravity to take over and the actors and sets to start sliding off the screen. Occasionally the camera angle see-saws back and forth between headshots of two people talking like a frantic tennis match. The famous scene where Harry and Holly are on the Ferris wheel especially seems like a constantly rocking boat in a storm. The film has a very visceral effect that is inescapable. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if some people left the theatre after seeing this feeling a bit queasy.
The city of Vienna is a huge part of the film and an active character. Beautiful 18th and 19th century buildings are seen adjacent to the ruins of 20th century warfare. The city that was once a cultural and intellectual center was now occupied by contentious forces and struggling to find some equilibrium. It’s the perfect backdrop for our characters battling to maintain their own moral equilibrium. And the city’s labyrinthian sewer system makes for spectacularly heightened drama in the grand finale. (Though I understand some of the sewer scenes were sets.)
The music by Anton Karas is also another major character in the film. The entire score is comprised of a solo zither which was highly unusual for the era when orchestral scores were the norm. The film’s release caused a sudden zither craze the world over – an instrument most people probably could not have even identified beforehand. The music is haunting yet also surprisingly playful. It has the sound of gypsy music or music you’d hear at a carnival – the music of outsiders, of displaced people always on the move, always looking over their shoulder. It reminded me of a Nino Rota score and sure enough, Rota “borrowed” this theme for La Dolce Vita.
For a dark murder mystery, there’s actually a good deal of humor to help balance things out. In one tense scene an ominous shadow looming down a street turns out to be an inebriated, old man selling balloons. In another scene, the comic relief comes from a pretentious book club gathering in which Holly Martins is asked to speak. Apparently, Graham Greene based this on an actual experience, so I suspect he was having a bit of naughty fun. And then one of the most famous lines in the film which was ad-libbed by Orson Welles (and not at all appreciated by the Swiss especially since they didn’t in actuality produce the cuckoo clock):
“You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
I do hope this means we’ve got some extraordinary art to look forward to in our current era.
In the Shadows with "The Third Man"
Nice piece of writing on “The Third Man”. I recently rewatched it on TCM and I agree it’s one of the all time classics. Have you seen “Our Man in Havana” the 1959 British spy comedy based on another of Graham Greene’s great novels? It’s not to be missed. Stars Alec Guinness, Noel Coward, Ernie Kovacs and Maureen O’Hara; is set in pre-revolution Cuba. Need I say more? It’s a favorite of mine.
Lovely snapshot of a great movie, thankyou! It's great when a movie offers such connections...