By Charlie Bertsch
What can The Third Man teach us today?
Although the film just celebrated its seventy-fifth birthday, it still feels vital.
Director Carol Reed wrings the last drop out of his extraordinarily talented cast and crew, crafting the rare work of art capable of pleasing the harshest critics and a public usually at odds with their expert opinions.
The Third Man is brilliant as a character study, a meditation on loyalty, and a sobering lesson on how wars continue to be fought long after the gunfire has stopped.
Yet some of the film’s greatest strengths conspire to make it seem particularly dated.
Robert Krasker’s cinematography turns black-and-white into a weapon, expelling the very memory of colour.
The iconic zither score of Anton Karas recalls a Europe still in the thrall of folk culture.
Orson Welles’ brief performance as the enigmatic Harry Lime was so compelling that he revived the character for radio plays.
Most of all, the rubble-strewn streets of postwar Vienna confront us with a singular setting. No matter how much the film captivates us, we will never confuse the harsh reality it captures with our own.
These qualities elicit great admiration, but always from a distance.
The Third Man refuses to hold viewers’ hands. Nevertheless, those who pay attention should eventually figure out who the characters are and how they relate to one another.
First and foremost, there is Holly Martins, who makes his living writing pulp novels about the American West.
He comes to Vienna to see his old friend Harry Lime, only to be told that his fellow American had just been killed in an accident.
Major Calloway, the world-weary commander of the divided city’s British sector, tries to send Martins home.
But Martins is sufficiently intrigued by the circumstances surrounding Lime’s death to stick around.
A hard-boiled narrative follows in which the would-be detective is disarmingly soft, an impression expertly conveyed by Joseph Cotton.
We see Martins repeatedly trying to make sense of his surroundings with the mindset of a character in one of his novels. But the American West they are set in is nothing like the Vienna he encounters.
Peering into a landscape where people are few and far between, and trouble can be spotted from a long way off, is the antithesis of his current situation. As Calloway keeps telling him, he can’t even see what is right under his nose.
Martins tries to sound tough, declaring that he is working on a mystery novel based on fact. But we perceive how poorly suited he is for comprehending a story in which nothing is quite what it seems.
Before writing the screenplay for The Third Man, Graham Greene wrote a short novel telling the same basic story, only with Calloway as a first-person narrator.
Combining tough-mindedness with a wry detachment, Calloway is the English equivalent of Raymond Chandler, someone who has seen too much to be deceived by appearances.
In the novel’s opening pages, Calloway calls Martins a “fool” who has “never grown up.”
Although the film doesn’t exactly contradict this assessment – and indeed allows Calloway to say more or less the same thing repeatedly – the fact that we get Martins’ perspective throughout complicates matters.
His immaturity and concomitant naïveté come off differently up close.
Normally, a character like Martins would be the primary locus of identification in a story of this nature. However, his haplessness resists this process.
We may like Martins, but we don’t want to be like him.
Indeed, the film goes out of its way to solicit investment in his friend Harry Lime, even though he does terrible things.
The speech Lime delivers to Martins when they finally meet on the Prater, Vienna’s storied Ferris wheel.
It feels better to understand this bitter postwar world in all its moral complexity, exemplified by this American who has mastered the ins and outs of Europe, than it does to preserve the simple-minded clarity of his childhood friend.
This famous scene is the place to begin searching for The Third Man’s relevance for our times.
Despite spending the last seventy-five years as the most powerful nation on the planet and despite countless examples of the United States acting in a brutally amoral fashion, Americans in Europe are still usually perceived the way Calloway sees Martins.
And so is American culture.
Perhaps the greatest achievement of The Third Man is to thematise that parallel.
Fans of The Third Man might know that the quest of protagonist Holly to find his elusive friend Harry Lime parallels the real-life difficulty of tracking Orson Welles down so that his scenes could be filmed.
The need to keep the shoot going in Welles’ absence inspired solutions that make the film more distinctive, such as using shadows to create the impression that Lime might be in a scene even when he isn’t.
More complex is the way that The Third Man thematises the production’s split nature, which forced the filmmakers to navigate their relationship with the notoriously temperamental Hollywood mogul David O. Selznick.
In his novel, Graham Greene gave Martins the first name “Rollo”. The subsequent decision to turn him into “Holly” slyly acknowledges this tension.
Because of his identification with the Western, Martins stands in for the Hollywood studio system’s traditional approach to genre, which prioritised stereotypes over subtlety.
The impetus for challenging that approach came from expatriate directors who brought European refinement to material not noted for showcasing shades of grey.
While their influence was already being felt in the 1930s, particularly in horror movies, it wasn’t until the war’s end that their influence achieved a critical mass, resulting in the disconcertingly ambivalent stories that a new generation of French critics would eventually label film noir.
Although Third Man was made years before this term began to circulate, it does a great job of anticipating that reevaluation of American culture, in which a counterpoint to the naivete exemplified by Holly Martins was discerned in a primarily B-movie genre defined by its pessimism.
Graham Green and Carol Reed argued over the film’s ending.
Green preferred the happier ending he wrote for his novel. But Reed refused to soften the story’s blow, a decision that Green later admitted was a crucial factor in making The Third Man great.
No matter how much has changed in Hollywood, most of the motion pictures released by the major studios let audiences off the hook.
It is only in smaller, independent films that the moral ambiguities depicted in The Third Man have a good chance of warding off the ideological closure of the happy ending.
That’s why, no matter how American those pictures are, they are aligned with Europe in the cultural imaginary. Not to mention Harry Lime.
The Third Man forcefully resists the impulse to provide easy solutions. Indeed, even though the film relates its villain’s misdeeds in excruciating detail, it forces us to recognise his appeal.
Please support The Battleground. Subscribe to our free newsletter and make a donation to ensure our continued growth and independence.
Screenshot courtesy of John Irving. Published under a Creative Commons license.