2024 is the 75th anniversary of a movie consistently voted by critics to be the greatest British film ever made: Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949).
The film opens with American pulp-novelist, Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) arriving in post-war Vienna at the invitation of his boyhood friend, Harry Lime. Holly quickly discovers that Vienna is no longer the elegant home of music and culture, but a city ruined by war and drowning in corruption. What's more, Harry is dead.
Any discussion of the film has to start with its extraordinary soundtrack. An exclusive use of cheerful Zither music as the score for a dark tale of corruption and despair must have been one of the more risky ideas in movie history. But it works a storm, from the opening credits onwards —capturing the cynical optimism and melancholy mysticism of post-war Central Europe (not that I was there in the 1940s, but Prague and Budapest still seemed pretty much that way forty years later in the 1980s, just before the Iron Curtain came down). The unique soundtrack by Anton Karas is so integral to the film's mood that it is extraordinary to realise that it would never have happened had director Carol Reed not chanced upon Karas playing the zither in a Viennese street one evening during shooting. Reed asked the stunned zitherist to compose the theme for his film. The theme tune became an extraordinary phenomenon, selling half a million recordings world wide. It transformed the film (and Karas' life). The 'Harry Lime song', as it became known, was so popular and so widely played that, my Mum, aged 11, was taken to see this dark, cynical, violent psychological thriller by my Grandpa under the fond illusion that they were off to watch a cheerful musical.
Visually, The Third Man is such a technically perfect film noir that some of cinematographer Robert Krasker's Oscar-winning black and white photography, with its justly famous tilted camera angles and chiaroscuro effects in retrospect border on pastiche. But that is perhaps because they have been so widely imitated ever since. The most famous scene is its climax: as the military police pursue the murderous Harry Lime (spoiler: it turns out he is not dead) through the deeply symbolic Viennese sewers. Like the soundtrack, the cinematography drives the mood of the film, capturing screenwriter Graham Greene's dark vision of corruption and cynicism in the wake of the destruction wrought by the Second World War. The setting of post-war Vienna, its classical architecture reduced to rubble, is breathtaking. The Third Man was filmed at one of the most poignant and crushing moments in human history, with people in Central Europe desperately trying to recover from a cataclysmic war and the horrors of totalitarian Nazi oppression—with many suddenly consigned by their American and British liberators into the arms of new oppressors and new horrors, hurled back into the nightmare of history. At the emotional centre of the film is the character of Anna (Alida Valli), not only mourning her (apparently) dead lover, Harry, but trying to avoid deportation to her native Czechoslovakia, now occupied by the brutal Soviet regime. The Kafkaesque nightmare of the confiscation of her passport and documentation, her quiet desperation in the face of bureaucratic indifference is beautifully rendered. Valli gives a wonderful performance emanating pain, love, bitterness, fear, self-loathing, trembling hope, defeated expectations, humiliation, nihilism and spirituality with each look and gesture.
Holly, quickly becomes infatuated with Anna. To him, she is not only a connection to his dead friend but represents a depth and intensity, born of her experiences and culture, that contrast with Holly's open, optimistic and shallow American energy. But she does not have the least interest in Holly other than the fact that, as Harry’s friend, he can help her understand Harry better and make Harry love her more. Indeed, the ending of the film is justly famous, as, following Harry's funeral (this time for real), Anna walks towards the waiting Holly, in a long, unbroken shot that lasts almost two minutes (an eternity in cinematic and dramatic terms). And then, instead of falling into his arms, as film convention would suggest, Anna carries on walking - past the camera and out of Holly's life. The End.
Part of the film's tragedy is that, while Anna loves Harry for his charm, wit and charisma, she also knows that he is evil; he is a gangster, whose profitable trade in adulterated penicillin on the black market has resulted in the deaths of huge numbers of Viennese children. Her love for him leaves her implicated in and corrupted by Harry's actions. Perhaps this is why (for me, at least) Orson Welles’ performance as enigmatic, anti-hero Harry Lime does not quite live up to its reputation, among some critics, as the greatest performance of Welles' career and the central performance in the film. It may just be that no actor (or human being) could live up to the love that Anna feels for Harry Lime. Admittedly, the famous scene in which Holly realises his friend is still alive, with the light suddenly capturing Harry's face, with its grin at once cherubic and diabolic, is spellbinding: one of the great moments in cinema. And Orson Welles conveys Lime's supercilious cynicism very well, not least in the famous 'Ferris Wheel' speech (which Welles improvised): "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."
However, Welles’ friend, and his co-star in The Third Man, Joseph Cotton (who plays the naive well meaning Holly) was a far more memorable (if less celebrated) villain in Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (made six years earlier than The Third Man), in which he, too, plays the role of a charming, charismatic man idealized by others but gradually revealed as not only a corrupt, hate-filled human being but also a serial murderer (it was apparently Hitchcock's favourite among his own films).
For me, the tense relationship between Holly Martins and Major Calloway, even more than Holly's love for Anna or his idealisation of Harry, is what really drives the movie. Trevor Howard is so good as the superficially cynical and emotionless British major, who, beneath the surface, even after so many years of brutalising war, burns with righteous anger at the evil that Lime has inflicted on Viennese children in the pursuit of a quick profit. His clear-eyed humanity contrasts with the bitter resignation of Anna, the self-interested insouciance of Harry and Holly’s endearing optimism (gradually exposed as an obtuse refusal to make hard moral choices). I think it is ultimately a more moving performance than Howard’s role in Brief Encounter, because it is not sentimental. Howard portrays Calloway as a man struggling to retain his ability to feel compassion and outrage amidst overwhelming corruption and cynicism. His face is hard, his voice is a sneering drawl, but his eyes are limpid and melancholy. This is a man who has looked into the heart of darkness. Holly, in contrast, hurtles around Vienna obliviously. His loyalty to his friend and his high mindedness are gradually revealed to be not just deluded but dangerous.
Holly gets people killed, notably the British Sergeant Paine, who dies trying to save Holly from his own recklessness. Bernard Lee's performance as Paine is an affecting study in stoicism: a decent man killed trying to save a deluded one. Lee is just one of the many excellent character actors adding texture to The Third Man. Wilfrid Hyde-White's comic turn as British cultural attache, Mr Crabbin, transformed his film career. And the actors playing Lime's criminal associates (Ernst Deutsch as the oleaginous Baron Kurtz, Erich Ponto as the sinister Dr Winckel and Siegfried Breuer as the smoothly threatening Popescu), each add superbly to the atmosphere of menace mixed with dark comedy.
It seems appropriate that director Carol Reed's masterpiece shares its 75th anniversary with the 100th anniversary of the death of writer, Franz Kafka. The maze-like setting of the city (dark alleyways, dank sewers, ruined buildings), the emotionless military bureaucrats oblivious to Anna's fate, the uncomprehending protagonist, Holly: all are deeply Kafkaesque. Like Kafka, Graham Greene, the film's screenwriter, saw clearly the unique horrors unleashed by modernity - the mass destruction, mass conformism and moral vacuity - to which the only conceivable response was tragicomic irony.
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