Sophisticated Evil vs. Simple Decency: Carol Reed and Graham Greene’s The Third Man (1949) Carol Reed and Graham Greene’s The Third Man (1949), the 11th Greatest Picture Ever Made, Starred Joseph “King” Cotten, Orson Welles, and Alida Valli, and Featured Trevor Howard and Bernard Lee, with Robert Krasker’s Legendary Cinematography, and Anton Karas’ Unforgettable Zither Theme
By Nicholas Stix and David in TN
(N.S. I thank my old friend and partner-in-crime, David in TN, for the material from the Film Noir Guide.)
Film Noir Guide: “An American Western writer (Cotten, as Holly Martins) arrives in postwar Vienna, ‘happy as a lark and without a cent,’ expecting to get a job with his best friend (Welles, as Harry Lime). Unfortunately, he arrives just in time for Welles’ funeral.
“Cotten is told that Welles was struck by a car while crossing the street, but, because of conflicting stories and too many coincidences, Cotten suspects that his childhood friend may have been murdered.
“Cotten meets Welles’ Czechoslovakian lover (Valli, as Anna Schmidt), in Vienna on a forged passport, and convinces her to help him investigate.
“A British military police officer (Howard, as Major Callaway) and his subordinate (Lee, as Sgt. Paine), eager to send the nosy American packing, inform him that Welles had been a small-time gangster specializing in the black market sale of watered-down penicillin, which was being administered to sick civilians, including children.
“Shocked and disgusted, Cotten agrees to give up his investigation and leave the country. But after Cotten sees Welles hiding in a darkened alley [sic] outside Valli’s apartment building, his loyalty and friendship are put to the ultimate test.
“The exciting climax in the labyrinthine Vienna sewer system is reminiscent of the Los Angeles storm drain manhunt in the 1948 film noir, He Walked by Night. The Third Man, which has been rated number 57 on the American Film Institute’s List of America’s (?) 100 Greatest Movies, is one of the best suspense films ever made. Cotten, Welles, and Valli are just sensational; Reed was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director, while Robert Krasker won an Oscar for Best Cinematography (black and white). “The Third Man Theme,” with its perky zither music, almost seems inappropriate, considering the film’s dark content, but, strangely, it works like a charm. Don’t miss this outstanding classic.”
David in TN: Last week in his outro, Eddie Muller gushingly called The Third Man “the greatest British film of all time.”
One of the main themes of The Third Man is the conflict between sophisticated evil vs. simple decency.
Harry Lime (Orson Welles) represents insouciant, sophisticated evil. At one point, while at the high point on Vienna’s world-famous Prater (ferris wheel), Harry gives one of most brilliant speeches in movie history, inspired by Nietzsche, about the insignificance of ordinary lives, while vaguely threatening to throw his “best friend” Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) to his death below.
Harry Lime: “You know, I never feel comfortable on these sorts of things. Victims? Don’t be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax - the only way you can save money nowadays….
“What fools we are, talking to each other this way. As if I’d do anything to you—or you to me!
“You’re just a little mixed up about things in general.
“Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t. Why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat, I talk about the suckers and the mugs – it’s the same thing. They have their five-year plans, so have I.”
Martins: “You used to believe in God.”
Harry Lime: “Oh, I still do believe in God, old man. I believe in God and Mercy and all that. But the dead are happier dead. They don’t miss much here, poor devils.”
Harry: “What do you believe in?...”
Harry: “(Laughs) Don’t be so gloomy! After all, it’s not that awful. What the fellow says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly.”
That speech has reverberated through the generations. Circa 2000, it was revised and re-purposed by the producer-writers of Once and Again (Marshall Herskovits and Ed Zwick) in a virtuoso episode, in which Nietzschean shopping mall developers permit the show’s hero, a struggling, divorced architect (Billy Campbell) to audition for the job of developing their next project. The developers have a working model of the shopping mall, with tiny pegs for shoppers. A female developer waxes, like Harry Lime, about the human insignificance of the shoppers.
The struggling architect comes to an impasse in his presentation, but then visibly overcomes it in the sort of gutty acting one would expect, on TV, only from a Ralph Bellamy (The Defender); Ed Asner (Rich Man, Poor Man); or Robert Duvall (Lonesome Dove).
On the side of simple decency are Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) and his adjutant, Sgt. Paine (Bernard Lee).
Paine is a simple, kind, big bear of a man, who is a fan of Martins’ childish Western novels. And yet, he’s the kind of simpleton that grows on a man. (Bernard Lee would become famous as Sean Connery’s bon vivant boss, “M,” in the James Bond movies, and he was effective in those pictures, but they didn’t inspire the sort of pathos that this one does).
Calloway is less simple and more manipulative, but every bit as decent. Yet unlike Sgt. Paine, Major Calloway is an avenging angel. He takes Holly to a hospital, where he shows him children dying, as a result of the watered-down penicillin Harry sold on the black market. We never see the children, just Holly’s reaction to them. I believe that this scene inspired Stanley Kramer’s use of the movies shot by American servicemen on Ike’s orders, when they liberated concentration camps, and encountered mountains of corpses, in a court scene in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). The very real films were routinely shown in court by American prosecutor Col. Tad Lawson (Richard Widmark).
There are three things that I recall of Robert Krasker’s Oscar-winning work as lighting photographer, aka Director of Photography, on this picture. He would shoot the members of Harry’s gang from odd angles, when we first meet them, to alert us that something’s not right about these fellows. The second matter was a sequence, beginning with shooting a cat jumping through some flowers on the windowsill in Harry’s apartment in the heart of Vienna, as that cat makes it to the street below (though we don’t see that), and ultimately, on the street opposite, to his master. Finally, Krasker made great use of the nighttime streets and sewers and ruins of a divided city that has just come through a conflagration.
Holly must choose between decency and friendship, decency and sophistication.
The funny thing is, the picture is drenched in irony, including that most ironic of scores, Anton Karas’ zither music. (The trick with Karas is that to avoid amoral glibness, when Harry’s gang is about to do evil, he switches from a jaunty beat to a rapid tempo and high pitch, and ups the volume.)
Director Carol Reed and novelist Graham Greene, the latter of whom turned in one of the three greatest original screenplays ever written (with Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles’ script for 1941’s Citizen Kane, and Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, and D.M. Marshman Jr.’s script for 1950’s Sunset Boulevard), were both on masterpiece runs. Reed’s previous two pictures were Odd Man Out (1947) and The Fallen Idol (1948), the latter of which Greene had also written. At that point, Reed and Greene could make anything work.
The Third Man also has one of the great fade-outs in movie history.
Here’s a movie mystery for you: How did Joseph “King” Cotten manage to not get nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor for The Third Man? Or for Best Supporting Actor for Citizen Kane? Or for Best Actor for Shadow of a Doubt (1943)?
Award-winning, New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix founded A Different Drummer magazine (1989-93). Stix has written for Die Suedwest Presse, New York Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, Middle American News, Toogood Reports, Insight, Chronicles, the American Enterprise, Campus Reports, VDARE, the Weekly Standard, Front Page Magazine, Ideas on Liberty, National Review Online and the Illinois Leader. His column also appears at Men's News Daily, MichNews, Intellectual Conservative, Enter Stage Right and OpinioNet. Stix has studied at colleges and universities on two continents, and earned a couple of sheepskins, but he asks that the reader not hold that against him. His day jobs have included washing pots, building Daimler-Benzes on the assembly-line, tackling shoplifters and teaching college, but his favorite job was changing his son's diapers.
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