The Third ManEven after World War II, Europe remained in chaos. Bombed out, destitute, nations sundered, one of the best representations of this would be Vienna, portrayed as a fragmented city still scarred from the destruction in director Carol Reed's The Third Man. And when a place like Vienna is savaged before by war and now by bureaucracy and occupation, it becomes the breeding ground for black markets and racketeering, the criminal element. Stuff from pulp fiction, sure, but a very real scenario for Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton), who comes to Vienna at the behest of his late friend, Harry Lime (...wait for it...)
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Watching The Third Man is like watching the birth of the modern movie--it is wrought with morally gray characters, set in a convincing (but still surreal) post-WWII Vienna, with tense action punctuated by an unorthodox musical score. Holly is an author of Wild West adventure novels--popular with some, but not enough for him to keep himself afloat exclusively on his literary talents; thus, his exodus at the behest of Harry to a land of unique opportunity: Vienna. An unidentified narrator (voiced by Joseph Cotton in the pre-1999 U.S. versions, all others going forward by Carol Reed) gives us a brief background into the existence of the criminal element in a city like Vienna, where the professional operators may smile and offer to buy you a drink, but one should never forget that they profit by capitalizing on another's suffering. From the onset, Holly's stay in Vienna is stricken with bad luck--his stride under a ladder early on is a cute manifestation of this. Upon discovering that his old chum has been slain in an automobile accident, Holly attends the sparse funeral, where most of the story's players are in attendance, and his appearance is the only one that isn't apparently expected. Holly may not seem the detective type--he refers to himself as a "hack writer who drinks too much...and falls in love with girls"--but he becomes increasingly determined to discover why a Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), a British police investigator who buys him a drink, makes accusations about Harry being involved in a racketeering scandal. Holly meets some of Harry's "friends", including the weaselly "Baron" Kurtz (Ernst Deutsch) and the slyly menacing Popescu (Siegfried Breuer) who offer up information about Harry's final moments which do not gel with the testimony of a porter where Harry lived. Little by little, as these facts fail to add up, Holly begins to immerse himself deeper and deeper into Harry's conspiracy, and begins to deduce that something foul is afoot in this fractured city. But Holly's attempts to glean the truth from the shadows surrounding him are met with resistance--lies by the friends of Harry, fear by the witnesses afraid to offer up testimony. Overall, the people of Vienna have been conditioned to avoid the police, even to give evidence to shed doubt on the circumstances of a vehicular homicide. They are acutely aware of the dark dealings happening every day on their doorstep, and would rather not get involved than risk retaliation by the wrong party. Holly's sense of adventure has heretofore been limited to the stories he writes; suddenly, he finds himself among rogues and scoundrels, untangling knots comprised of lies, and gradually understanding the implications behind the thinly-veiled threats to keep his nose out of where it doesn't belong.
The Third Man is noteworthy for many reasons, but one of the immediately recognizable ones is the musical score by Anton Karas, performed on a zither, which is something like a fretless guitar. The unusual musical score creates an atmosphere both of uneasy whimsy mixed with anxious melancholy, and punctuates the action as an authentic musical accompaniment of the setting, as opposed to an artificial, orchestrated score at odds with the street-level intrigue. The Third Man also boasts the most famous entrance in movie history. I would note that while Orson Welles enjoys top billing for this film, he remains notably absent for almost the entirety of the picture--to say more would spoil the fun. As a post-war melting pot of various nationalities, an American like Holly Martins remains unfamiliar with the varied languages of his destination. This means that for English-speaking audiences, just like Holly, we will not understand what is being "said" by background characters, but often understand what the meaning is when other characters converse in other languages. If there is one film where the presence of subtitles would diminish the experience, The Third Man is it. The mixture of the unfamiliar languages means that its presence is less about communication than the cadence which follows language, which is more interesting as a mystery than it would be if explained away--much like Harry Lime. This comes across in multiple great moments in the film, but one of my favorite scenes is when Holly and Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli) return to visit the porter who first indicated to Holly that there was an unidentified "third man" at the scene of Harry's death, only to gradually discover that the porter they intended to speak with has been murdered...and little by little they discover that the crowd of onlookers suspect that Martins is the killer. And the cleverness in the writing by Graham Greene hardly ends here. Another favorite scene comes during the film's climax, when the combined police groups are all pursuing their quarry through the sewer tunnels below the Vienna streets, and the reverberations in multiple languages come through the multitude of dark corridors, a their combined, incomprehensible languages a babble of echoes. But ironically, one of the most famously quoted passages of dialogue is often credited to Orson Welles, who delivers of the most famous remarks in film with his "cuckoo clock speech", a testament to a wit as sharp as a razor's edge. So long, old man.
Recommended for: Fans of classic films who are thrilled by dialogue and action as fresh as any modern film today, set in the backdrop of the post-war limbo of Vienna, where the long shadows and the melody of the zither stay with you long after the credits.
The Third Man is noteworthy for many reasons, but one of the immediately recognizable ones is the musical score by Anton Karas, performed on a zither, which is something like a fretless guitar. The unusual musical score creates an atmosphere both of uneasy whimsy mixed with anxious melancholy, and punctuates the action as an authentic musical accompaniment of the setting, as opposed to an artificial, orchestrated score at odds with the street-level intrigue. The Third Man also boasts the most famous entrance in movie history. I would note that while Orson Welles enjoys top billing for this film, he remains notably absent for almost the entirety of the picture--to say more would spoil the fun. As a post-war melting pot of various nationalities, an American like Holly Martins remains unfamiliar with the varied languages of his destination. This means that for English-speaking audiences, just like Holly, we will not understand what is being "said" by background characters, but often understand what the meaning is when other characters converse in other languages. If there is one film where the presence of subtitles would diminish the experience, The Third Man is it. The mixture of the unfamiliar languages means that its presence is less about communication than the cadence which follows language, which is more interesting as a mystery than it would be if explained away--much like Harry Lime. This comes across in multiple great moments in the film, but one of my favorite scenes is when Holly and Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli) return to visit the porter who first indicated to Holly that there was an unidentified "third man" at the scene of Harry's death, only to gradually discover that the porter they intended to speak with has been murdered...and little by little they discover that the crowd of onlookers suspect that Martins is the killer. And the cleverness in the writing by Graham Greene hardly ends here. Another favorite scene comes during the film's climax, when the combined police groups are all pursuing their quarry through the sewer tunnels below the Vienna streets, and the reverberations in multiple languages come through the multitude of dark corridors, a their combined, incomprehensible languages a babble of echoes. But ironically, one of the most famously quoted passages of dialogue is often credited to Orson Welles, who delivers of the most famous remarks in film with his "cuckoo clock speech", a testament to a wit as sharp as a razor's edge. So long, old man.
Recommended for: Fans of classic films who are thrilled by dialogue and action as fresh as any modern film today, set in the backdrop of the post-war limbo of Vienna, where the long shadows and the melody of the zither stay with you long after the credits.