Carol Reed and Graham Greene

The Third Man (1949) is one of a number of films directed by Reed based on the work of the writer, Graham Greene. The film is acknowledged, for a variety of reasons, to be the high-point of Reed’s career, and one of the greatest films ever made. Certainly, one of the best British films of the 20C.

Greene’s story is set amongst the war-torn ruins of Vienna. Representatives of the victorious powers have partitioned the city. The resulting administrative confusion is, along with the inevitable shortage of essential supply, exploited by an underclass of gangsters and black-marketeers.

An American writer, Holly Martins, played by Joseph Cotton, arrives in Vienna at the invitation of Harry Lime. Matins is shocked to discover that Lime is dead. His attempt to investigate the death of his friend reveals the unpleasant truth that Lime was well known as a racketeer involved in the sale of corrupted penicillin.

The film is divided into two parts. In the first, Lime’s personality is recalled as charming and compelling. At the same time, the facts of his duplicity began to be pieced together by Martins. In the second, Lime suddenly reappears. His death is revealed to have been another fraud aimed at escaping justice. Lime attempts to justify himself to his friend before fleeing through the sewers. Eventually, he is cornered and dies like a rat.

The Third Man shares a number of themes with Greene’s other work. The circumstances of war, along with the terrible revelations of brutality and genocide, came together with Greene’s Catholic belief to suggest a world where corruption and original sin are commonplace. For Greene, the struggle against the forces of evil remained largely futile. Greene’s Catholicism retained, accordingly, a particularly bleak sort of outlook.

Orson Welles and Harry Lime

It was a great coup for Reed to secure the services of Orson Welles to play Harry Lime.

Welles was an actor-director who had, famously, come to the public’s attention by staging a hyper-realistic radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds. The news style staging of the play was so successful that some member of the public were reported to have got in their cars and fled to the country.

Welles built on this notoriety by making a dramatically successful first feature Citizen Kane (1941). The film was a thinly veiled dramatisation of the rise and fall of William Randolph Hearst, American newspaper proprietor.

Welles created a number of compelling grotesques throughout his career. Harry Lime was one, Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil (1958) another.

Cuckoo Clocks (Right and Wrong in Vienna)

Perhaps the most famous scene in The Third Man is the discussion on the giant Reisenrad Ferris wheel. Lime attempts to justify himself to his friend Martins by looking down at the small dots of humanity below and asking whether, at twenty thousand dollars each, any of them would really be missed. Finally, Lime suggests that Switzerland, with its centuries of peace and cuckoo clocks, is a poor alternative to the Renaissance of the Borgias. There, suggest Lime, were combined bloodbath and genius in equal measure.

The Gutter (Down and Out in Vienna)

It is perhaps appropriate that the fugitive Lime runs into the Viennese sewers.

The subterranean caverns, reminding us of Pirenesi, become the setting for the doomed endgame where Lime is hunted down. Lime’s pursuers are implacable. Eventually, they corner him and a short gunfight comes to its inevitable conclusion.

There are several other points that need to be made in relation to this film. The Third Man was a triumph for a young lighting cameraman, Robert Krasker. Krasker devised an art direction for the film based on German Expressionist film making from the 1920s and from the Noir thrillers in America.

Krasker, filming amongst the rubble of Vienna, used powerful directional lighting to create a world of sinister shadows and weird perspectives. The result was a morally ambiguous and visually destabilising world in which Lime and his cronies were all too believable.

Finally, no mention of this film would be complete without the name of Anton Karas. The soundtrack of the film, entirely extemporised by Karas, is probably the most famous piece of film music ever.

So, The Third Man is a film where a number of exceptional talents came together and made something much bigger and more impressive than the sum of its parts.

A masterpiece and a top-ten film if ever there was one.