Sometimes, a film just comes together – by circumstance, by the confluence of top class talent and by serendipity. Then it moves on from being just another creative endeavor to becoming a great work of art and then, a classic for all times.
The Third Man is one such film.
Much has been written about The Third Man, released 70 years ago. The famous Harry Lime theme has become a mnemonic to evoke images of the film: the dark corners of post-war Vienna, the sinister shadows, the gutters and of course the man himself, Harry Lime, black marketer of life-saving drugs who still commands the loyalty and love of his friends.
Lines from the film are quoted by buffs, the most famous of them being the Cuckoo clock speech (said to have been written by Orson Welles, who plays Harry Lime):
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.
Students of cinema still discuss the camerawork, the tilted Dutch angles, the use of light, the build-up of the story, the dramatic entry, late in the film, of Harry Lime – who the military police and even his friends are looking for. And of course, the ending, surely one of the most memorable last scenes in film history.
Vienna of the 1940s
The Third Man is based on a novella by Graham Greene, which he wrote as preparation for the screenplay. Carol Reed, who directed The Fallen Idol (1948), also written by Greene, was the director. Greene went to Vienna to research and returned much affected by the atmosphere and what he learnt about the black market for drugs.
It was decided that the film would be shot on location, which was then in ruins and under the administrative control of four allied powers, each operating in its own zone. The bombed out city became a central character in the film.
There were shortages everywhere and racketeers thrived. It was, in every way, the perfect setting for a crime film. Later, that collective ‘genre’ came to be known as ‘film noir’, though the term hadn’t been coined yet.
Also Read: Exploring the Final Years of Orson Welles, the Errant Genius Cast Out by Hollywood
Film noir drew its style from German expressionism and the films of directors such as Fritz Lang and Robert Murnau. The dramatically lit black and white scenes, with lights and long shadows, unusual camera angles and distorted reality bordering on surrealism were all projections of the warped morals of its central characters and of society at large.
The stories were about flawed individuals and evil, often amoral men who had no qualms about manipulating others, even killing them. The rise of Nazi ideology added more sinister air to this kind of cinema. Lang’s film M, about a serial killer of children hunted by the police and other criminal gangs, is one of the most famous examples of German expressionist cinema.
Orson Welles as Harry Lime in The Third Man. Credit: Screengrab
The birth of film noir
Escaping Nazi Germany, many of these European directors moved to Hollywood. Here, the studios handed them low budget projects and stories drawn from pulp novels to make what came to be known as ‘B’ grade films. The phrase originally meant films that were tagged along with the main, lavishly produced block buster for the cinemas to be shown as a double bill, but is now used for any low-cost, schlock film. Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder), Laura (Otto Preminger) and The Big Heat (Fritz Lang) are among the better known noir films these directors made.
In the US and the UK, noir cinema in the early days reflected post-war cynicism. The stories were about innocent people caught in a spiral of circumstances not of their own making, of corruption in high places, crooked cops and venal politicians, criminal bosses with a veneer of respectability, femmes fatale, private eyes and cheap hoods. In the middle, often, was the honest – a detective, private eye, shamus – man with a code, standing tall and fighting the forces of evil. The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep and many more fall within that tradition.
Almost all these films were located in the urban framework, the city standing in as a symbol of alienation, where greed was the way to get ahead and where the nexus between power structures – on both sides of the law – was close knit and worked to each other’s benefit. A naïve outsider – to the city or to the networks – had no chance of survival.
Carol Reed was familiar with the style and had made the noirish Odd Man Out in 1947. Orson Welles too had directed The Stranger (1946) and Lady from Shanghai (1947) and of course, Citizen Kane (1941), whose story too was about betrayed friendship, just like The Third Man.
Reed’s The Third Man tells the story of Holly Martin, a pulp novel writer who comes to Vienna to meet his friend Harry Lime, who has offered him a job. He finds out that Lime was killed in a car accident just hours before and goes to the funeral, where he meets two British officers who tell him his friend was a criminal, also suggesting that Martin leave Vienna.
Martin stays, and, wanting to clear his friend’s name, sets about meeting those who knew Lime, including some very strange and shady characters and Lime’s girlfriend Anna Schmidt. But gradually it becomes clear to even Martin that his friend is a villain – their encounter, where Lime subtly threatens Martin on a giant wheel is a chilling scene – and this sets off the hunt for him, finally ending in the sewers of Vienna, where Lime is cornered like a rat. (There is still a Harry Lime tour in Vienna that goes down, literally, to the gutters.)
The atmosphere of the film – menacing, full of foreboding – is enhanced by the music, composed by Anton Karas, who Reed came across in a Vienna restaurant playing the zither. The Harry Lime theme, arguable one of the best known film soundtracks of all time, plays at opportune moments, such as when Lime makes his first appearance one night.
All these components collectively make for a film that has not lost its impact even after seven decades. Robert Krasker’s cinematography, which has inspired photographers for generations, won an Academy award, and the film itself got a BAFTA and the Grand Prize at Cannes.
The Cuckoo clock reference has passed into popular speech and for that, and so much more, the film is a must see for anyone interested in cinema and especially in film noir.
