…yet made of stars

Carol Reed’s The Third Man is a prime example of what you get when an American movement like noir is adopted and adapted by a talented British filmmaker. Prior to this film, noir was more or less an exclusively American movement, albeit one with roots in European expressionism; with this masterpiece, Reed took the idiom and made it his own. The Third Man has very little of the typical American brashness possessed by most of its counterparts made across the pond; instead, it maintains a much more withdrawn, calculated immediacy. Gone are the ubiquitous shadows and the menacing music; in their place is a slow-burning, meticulous sense of craft that manages a historical and political resonance rarely seen within the genre. The end result is nothing short of transcendent.

The story itself is set in a post-World War II Vienna, Austria, war-torn and carved up by the powers that be: the British, the Americans, the French and the Russians all control roughly a quarter of the territory. Into this scene steps Holly Martins (a brilliantly confused Joseph Cotten), an American pulp-western novelist who’s been having trouble finding work since the war ended. He’s come to Vienna without a penny in his pocket because his friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) has promised him work. Martins steps off the train, only to find that Lime has died—killed in a car accident. The more he looks at the situation, though, the more there appears to have been some sort of cover-up, especially when he finds that Harry was deep into the world of organized crime. And perhaps Lime isn’t even really dead.

Though its lead roles are filled by Americans playing American characters, The Third Man is a distinctly British film, and in fact, Cotten plays Holly as what can only be described as a British stereotype of Americans (though not necessarily a negative one)—brash and demanding, with little concern for international affairs and no respect for protocol. The Third Man is missing a private dick, but Holly essentially fills the role himself, openly defying the local British authorities and stopping at nothing (well—hardly anything) in an effort to track down the truth.

This is no mere mystery, however, and distinctly European philosophy colors the proceedings from the moment the film begins. As the very-much-alive Harry Lime, Orson Welles (who at this point had been reduced to making token film appearances in order to fund his independent films) doesn’t appear on screen until the last half hour—but he controls every inch of it, effortlessly stealing every scene he’s in. Lime is the quintessential Nietzschean übermensch, possessing no morals or ethics to speak of, controlling everyone around him, and killing them as he sees fit.

Reed’s distinctive visual style comes into play here, as Lime is consistently portrayed as physically above all the other characters—on the roofs of buildings, at the top of a Ferris wheel (this particular scene is now iconic, of course). For the most part, however, this is a style that’s more subtle than the average American noir, and while Reed manages to throw a Dutch angle or two into nearly every scene, much of the film is well-lit—which makes every hulking shadow all the more unnerving when it appears. This is the sort of masterpiece where every inch of the screen says something specific throughout the entire film, and many of the motifs (note Reed’s subtle use of dogs and cats) require multiple viewings to be fully understood.

The same, of course, goes for the music. Instead of the bombastic orchestral score that features in most Hollywood films of this period (including almost all noirs), all of The Third Man is backed by a solo zither, with music composed and performed by Anton Karas, who before this film was an unknown playing in the bars of Vienna (Reed actually discovered him during the course of on-location filming). The music possesses a lighter, almost comic, touch, which both accents the proceedings and contrasts with them; it’s the final touch that completes a distinctly European take on the American noir.

During the final chase, however, the music—which previously, had accented the suspense to great effect—drops out entirely, even as Lime has fallen from his own heights—quite literally: while he once appeared on the roofs, he has now descended in the sewers of Vienna. As the British army chases him through the claustrophobic tunnels, they do so in silence; all we hear is the thudding of feet, echoing endlessly. Soon it becomes clear why: because there is no suspense to accent. As thrilling a chase as it is, it’s obvious that Harry Lime will not get away; and in fact, he’s been doomed from the start.

The motif of resurrection seems a strange one to find in film noir, pervasive though it may be, until one realizes that the resurrections of noir are always false resurrections. Laura may be alive, but she continues in a tortured, pre-feminist existence, at the mercy of whatever man she is attached to. Al Roberts, by assuming the role of the dead Charles Haskell in Detour, actually becomes his killer. George Grisby’s plan for his own death and resurrection in The Lady from Shanghai ends merely in his death. Orson Welles’s character in The Third Man is no different: much like the title character in Scarface: The Shame of a Nation, whose corpse stands ambiguously on his mother’s porch just before toppling over, Harry Lime (note the last name—and the fact that Reed takes pains to show his mourners sprinkling lime on his body at both funerals) has been dead from the beginning; it just took the reaper a couple of tries to claim his soul.

For all its Nietzschean posturing, The Third Man is ultimately a film that owes more to Marx. The narrative is, ultimately, less about Harry and his philosophy than it is about Holly’s eventual rejection of it. The Third Man’s bleak vision of Vienna is filled with people who have been completely impoverished and alienated by the war—many of whom are killed, and then casually stepped over by the storyline, in favor of the powers that be and the criminals they’re chasing—and is there any doubt that this irony is intentional? The Third Man is, ultimately, a story of “great men” fighting to mold the world into how they see fit (both in the war that preceded it, and in the reconstruction that frames it) and the people they callously trample on their way there. In one of the key scenes, Welles ad libs:

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.

And, of course, he’s entirely right. In a paradox that the human race is never likely to come to terms with, it’s almost exclusively times of hardship that produce great art. This was true of the Renaissance, it was true of American blues and gospel music, and of course it’s true of film noir and The Third Man. Man’s inhumanity to man is likely to continue indefinitely, but as long as beautiful flowers like this film continue to grow out of the proverbial dung heap, perhaps there’s hope.