The world doesn’t make any heroes outside of your stories ✵ The Third Man - A GOLDEN AGE IN BLACK AND WHITE ✵ 1931–1949 - The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

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IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Film noir

DIRECTOR

Carol Reed

WRITER

Graham Greene

STARS

Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard

BEFORE

1941 The film noir genre is established by US movies such as The Maltese Falcon.

1941 With Citizen Kane, Orson Welles establishes a film-noir staple—the narrative voice-over.

AFTER

1951 Welles revives his Third Man character on radio in The Adventures of Harry Lime.

Carol Reed’s 1949 film noir The Third Man captured Europe’s fractured spirit after World War II. Unusually for the time, Reed shot it in partly on location, in bomb-damaged Vienna. Dramatic pools of light and shade, and tilted camera angles, turn the city into a nightmarish setting for the tale of racketeer Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles. Echoing through it all is the haunting zither music of Anton Karas, whom Reed found while shooting in Vienna.

The screenplay was developed by novelist Graham Greene from his own novella. It came from a simple thought that occurred to Greene: “I saw a man walking down the street whose funeral I had only recently attended.” This idea inspired the story of a man who fakes his own death.

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The movie was hugely popular in Britain, but fared poorly in Austria. To Austrian audiences, it was a painful reminder of a troubled past.

The third man

American pulp-fiction author Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) arrives in a Vienna wrecked and divided by war at the invitation of his old friend Harry Lime, only to find that Lime has been killed by a speeding car just days earlier. At the funeral, Martins meets the two men who were with Lime when he died. He also meets Lime’s girlfriend Anna (Alida Valli), with whom he becomes smitten. Together they question the porter at Lime’s apartment building, who tells them there was an unknown third man present at the fatal moment.

On Vienna’s giant Ferris wheel, known as the Riesenrad, police chief Calloway (Trevor Howard) advises Martins to leave Vienna, revealing that Lime was a black marketeer who sold adulterated penicillin. Martins visits Anna, who tells him that she might be deported to the Soviet sector of the city. As he leaves, he spots a figure in the shadows. It’s Lime.

Martins meets Lime the next day at the Riesenrad, where Lime has invited Martins to join him. Martins, realizing how much his old friend has changed, agrees to help Calloway trap Lime, on the condition that Anna receive safe passage out of Vienna. When Anna refuses to accept the police chief’s deal, Calloway takes Martins to a children’s hospital to show him the devastation caused by Lime’s adulterated penicillin—and persuades Martins on moral grounds to help him trap Lime even if Anna is not saved.

Anna warns Lime of the trap, and he tries to escape through the sewers. The climax, a masterful symphony of action beneath the Viennese streets, is one of the most thrilling moments in cinema.

"Has there ever been a film where the music more perfectly suited the action than in Carol Reed’s The Third Man?"

Roger Ebert
Chicago Sun-Times, 1996

Casting Welles

That the movie turned out as it did is due largely to the determination of the director Carol Reed. Producer David O. Selznick had wanted suave British actor Noel Coward to play Harry Lime, but Reed insisted on Orson Welles. The influence of Welles can be seen not just in his acting but in the dramatic film noir shooting style, which clearly owes a lot to Welles’s own movies Citizen Kane (1941) and The Lady from Shanghai (1947).

For the final chase through the sewers of Vienna, scenes were shot partly on location and partly on studio sets. Reed brilliantly edited together the long, empty caverns of the sewers, with their glistening bricks and sudden shafts of light, and the echoing footsteps and close-ups of Lime’s sweaty face glistening like the bricks, eyes darting this way and that as he searches for a way out. As ever-growing teams of police chase Lime through the sewers, only the running water and the cops’ echoing calls in German can be heard. The sense of panic rises as Lime flees like a rat.

Both Selznick and Greene had wanted an upbeat ending, but Reed insisted on keeping it bleak. Greene later admitted Reed had been right.

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Clever use of shadows heightens the sense of menace in the dark streets of war-ravaged Vienna. The noir style is strongly reminiscent of Orson Welles’s own movies, but Welles later insisted that he had taken no direct role in the movie’s direction or editing.

Moral vacuum

As part of the postwar Allied occupation of Austria, Vienna had been divided into four zones—US, British, French, and Soviet—with a jointly controlled central district. The Third Man exploits the political tensions that existed between the occupying forces, and the dramatic potential of characters’ movements between the sectors. Those without papers, such as Anna, are desperate to avoid the Soviet sector, where their fate is uncertain.

As far as Lime is concerned, this situation has created the perfect moral vacuum, in which inventive, dynamic, ruthless men such as him can, and should, thrive. Europe is world-weary and cynical in the aftermath of the war, and for Lime, his fellow American, Martins, is a naive child stepping into it.

"Over it all spreads the melancholy, inert beauty of a ruined city, passive on the surface, twitching with uneasy life underneath."

Vogue,
1949

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Lime is cool and calculating, and has disdain for Martins’ moralistic view of the world. In Lime’s cynical opinion, there are no heroes in the real world.

Improvised lines

Greene’s script for The Third Man is as taut as you would expect from such a peerless writer, but some of the movie’s most memorable lines were improvised by Welles. One reason for the movie’s durability is that it successfully connects the talents of three hugely gifted men: Reed, Greene, and Welles.

Lime looks down from the wheel on the people like dots below, and asks Martins if he would feel pity if one of them “stopped moving forever”. He challenges Martins: “If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?”

Back on the ground, Lime says, in lines added in by Welles for timing: “You know what the fellow said—in Italy, for 30 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 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” According to Welles, the words came from an old Hungarian play. Ironically, the Swiss did not invent the cuckoo clock at all, and they had been decidedly warlike at the time of the Borgias. Nonetheless, the words seem to sum up perfectly Lime’s amoral outlook on the world.

“In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Harry Lime / The Third Man

CAROL REED Director

Born in London in 1906, Carol Reed was the son of the famous Shakespearean actor-producer Herbert Beerbohm Tree and his mistress May Reed, whose name he took. He started acting at an early age, and joined the theater company of the thriller writer Edgar Wallace, becoming his personal assistant. This led to his first work as an assistant director.

Reed’s early movies as a director, such as Midshipman Easy (1935), met with only moderate success, but the novelist Graham Greene saw great potential in them. Reed made his first significant movie, Odd Man Out, about an Irish terrorist on the run, in 1947. The producer, Alexander Korda, introduced Reed to Greene and they made two great movies together, The Fallen Idol and The Third Man, which was critically acclaimed and a huge box-office success. Reed died in London in 1976.

Key movies

1947 Odd Man Out

1948 The Fallen Idol

1949 The Third Man

1968 Oliver!

What else to watch: The 39 Steps (1935) ✵ Brighton Rock (1947) ✵ The Fallen Idol (1948) ✵ Our Man in Havana (1959) ✵ The Manchurian Candidate (1962) ✵ The Ipcress File (1965) ✵ The Spy Who Came in from the Cold(1965)