273 - The Third Man, 1949, United Kingdom. Dir. Carol Reed.
Sometimes all the pieces just fall into place.
It happened for Casablanca. It happened for Chinatown.
It happened for The Third Man.
The writer. The producers. The director. The cinematographer. The art director. The composer and musician. The actors. All the actors. Everything. Sometimes it all just comes together.
Vienna.
After the War.
The Zither. Played by Anton Karas.
Alexander Korda. David O. Selznick. Two top producers putting together the pieces.
Orson Welles. Young and handsome. Mysterious and charming. Athletic and relatively thin. Hyper intelligent.
Joseph Cotten. All-American. Elegant. Gallant. The man you always love.
Alida Valli. Beautiful. Strong. Fiercely in love.
Trevor Howard as Maj. Calloway. The 1st Elder from Superman (1978). Judge Broomfield from Gandhi (1982).
Bernard Lee as Sgt. Paine. You know him as M from James Bond. Eleven James Bonds, from Dr. No (1962) to Moonraker (1979). Plus, a 12th, a spoof, From Hong Kong with Love (1975). Seriously. And as Patmore from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965). And many other movies.
The cinematography. More Dutch angles than they have in Amsterdam. More shadows than they have in The Shadow.
And miles and miles of gorgeously choreographed sewer tunnels.
Yes.
Gorgeously choreographed sewer tunnels.
Graham Greene. One of the great literary writers of the 20th century. Also a popular writer. Also a screenwriter. Brighton Rock (1938). The Confidential Agent (1939). The Power and the Glory (1940). The Heart of the Matter (1948). The Third Man (1949). The Quiet American (1955). Our Man in Havana (1958). The Comedians (1966). Screenplays for The Fallen Idol (1948) and Saint Joan (1957), in addition to adaptations of the novels above.
He was also a real spy.
Carol Reed. Working at the top of his game. A director of cities.
We have seen Night Train to Munich, set in Munich, and Odd Man Out, set in Belfast. The Fallen Idol was set in London. Now we are in Vienna.
Vienna. London. Belfast. Munich. Everybody's talking about, mmm, Pop Muzik.
Consider this: Carol Reed is directing a quintessentially European film using a quintessentially American style--film noir--and he is using as his stars the stars from the films that gave us that style.
By now Orson Welles has already made Citizen Kane (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Stranger (1946), and The Lady from Shanghai (1947). Joseph Cotten has starred in the first two of those. Joseph Cotten has also written Journey Into Fear (1942), which they have both starred in.
With these films Orson Welles has launched a new visual style that immediately becomes popular throughout the 1940s.
Now Carol Reed is directing him, as well as Joseph Cotten, using that style. Welles is here only as an actor, and he is quoted as showing Reed tremendous respect, trusting Reed to do the heavy lifting as a director. And Reed comes through in spades.
Joseph Cotten plays Holly Martins. He grew up with and was close friends with Harry Lime. Now he has come to Vienna to visit Lime. But he is told right away that Lime has recently died.
Martins goes to the burial service and begins asking questions. His quest will lead him into the adventures of the movie.
He meets Maj. Calloway, who gives him a ride. And he sees a mysterious woman, who will turn out to be Anna Schmidt.
Martins is a popular American pulp Western novelist. The lone writer of The Lone Rider of Santa Fe. Death at Double-Edge Ranch. Oklahoma Kid.
Lime died when he was hit by a car, and there were two men at the scene. They tried to help him. They gave him aid. They called for an ambulance. But they could not save him in time.
A medical orderly, Joseph Harbin, has gone missing.
Martins persists in asking questions, sticking his nose where it does not belong, and in the process he will discover things that the police did not even learn in their inquest, one of them being that there was a third man at the scene of the crime.
The man who tells him about the third man will die.
There are people who want Martins to be quiet.
There are people who want him to go home.
There are people who want Martins . . . well . . .
Vienna has a certain personality, a black market--everyone has a racket--and it would not do to upset things.
In Chinatown the racket is water. In The Third Man it will prove to be penicillin. Stealing it from military hospitals. Diluting it to make it go farther. And turning a blind eye when people lose their legs to gangrene, lose their babies in childbirth, lose their minds, or die of meningitis.
Don't be so gloomy.
There are four zones--American, British, Russian, French--and an international center. Jurisdictions overlap. Things are complicated.
"All (are) strangers to the place and none of them (can) speak the same language."
But as with all good film noir protagonists, Martins does not know how to leave well enough alone.
He is warned.
"Death's at the bottom of everything, Mr. Martins. Leave death to the professionals."
He will learn more than he wanted to know.
Can you imagine knowingly allowing people to die so that you can make money?
Can you imagine finding out the one you love is doing it and then loving him anyway?
Can you imagine killing your best friend?
Someone is going to pay for all of this.
A high price.
A very high price.
Peter Bogdanovich asserts that Carol Reed's The Third Man may be the greatest non-auteur movie ever made.
It is certainly one of the most beautiful.
Orson Welles said "Black and white is the actor's friend." It is here. It is Vienna's friend as well.
A major star appears after an hour into the movie. And is introduced by a cat. And his feet.
One of the great scenes in film history occurs at the top of a Ferris wheel.
And at the bottom.
And one of the great chase scenes occurs in those miles and miles of sewers.
On foot.
In the tunnels.
Now if only we can find out who that third man is.
And why he matters.
* * * * *
Victims? Don't be so melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me, would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you 20,000 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?
Don't be so gloomy. After all, it's not that awful. 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 they produce? The cuckoo clock.
You used to believe in God.
I still do. I believe in God and mercy and all that. But the dead are happier dead. They don't miss much here, poor devils.
If you want to sell your services, I'm not willing to be the price. I loved him. You loved him. What good have we done him? Love! Look at yourself. They have a name for faces like that.
Victims? Don't be so melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me, would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you 20,000 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?
Don't be so gloomy. After all, it's not that awful. 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 they produce? The cuckoo clock.
You used to believe in God.
I still do. I believe in God and mercy and all that. But the dead are happier dead. They don't miss much here, poor devils.
If you want to sell your services, I'm not willing to be the price. I loved him. You loved him. What good have we done him? Love! Look at yourself. They have a name for faces like that.
You'll fall in love again. / Can't you see, I don't want to. I don't ever want to.
Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton wrote an essay in 1955 that began the definition of film noir, citing 1946--after the war was over--as the year that French film fans discovered this new style--or what they call a "series"--because that was the year after the War when American films became available to them again. These are the films they cited as representative:
Phase one (Summer of 1946). The Maltese Falcon, John Huston (10/3/1941); Laura, Otto Preminger (1944); Murder, My Sweet, Edward Dmytryk (1944); Double Indemnity, Billy Wilder (1944); The Woman in the Window, Fritz Lang (1944).
Phase two (Fall of 1946). This Gun for Hire, Frank Tuttle (1942); The Killers, Robert Siodmak (1946); Lady in the Lake, Robert Montgomery (1947); Gilda, Charles Vidor (1946); The Big Sleep, Howard Hawks (1946).
In the essay, Borde and Chaumeton group films together according to their thematic elements, including dreams, nightmares, strangeness, eroticism, sadism, cruelty, ambivalence, crime (blackmail, accusation, theft, drug trafficking), murder, violence, corruption, decadence, and determinism.
But what else causes us to group films together and call them film noir? Style. Harsh lighting. High key lighting. Dark shadows. Wide-angle lenses. Deep focus. Single vanishing point perspective. Urban landscapes. Wet streets.
And who brought that style to the fore before all the films listed above?
Orson Welles.
Stylistically, Citizen Kane (5/1/1941) is the prototype of film noir. Were there others before him? Absolutely. Welles himself would credit John Ford! Film critics often cite Boris Ingster's Stranger on the Third Floor (8/16/1940) as the first film noir (starring none other than Peter Lorre). I would argue that the last portion of Raoul Walsh's They Drive By Night (7/26/1940) contains elements even earlier.
But all of this finds root in German expressionism, and one of its own directors is listed above, the last one in Phase One, Fritz Lang. His (and others') 1930s German films influenced everything that came afterwards.
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http://observer.com/2000/01/thriller-of-the-century-the-third-man/
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