Three-quarters of a century ago, Holly Martins stepped off a train in Vienna expecting to see his old friend Harry Lime waiting at the station. The plot of The Third Man – Carol Reed and Graham Greene’s noir masterpiece – subsequently rises from the rubble of this war-torn European capital, and in the intervening years since its 1949 release its nasty picture of post-World War II profiteering has become only nastier. Despite this grim milieu, The Third Man‘s near-perfect execution of noir hallmarks, first-rate characters and performances, and refusal to embrace false hope or forced cynicism mark the film as a true great that reveals new layers on each rewatch.
Few everymen in crime films have Martins’ unique bad luck: he has run-ins with the British military police, suspicious children, and even a bad-tempered parrot before losing his friend (who was never truly his friend) and the woman with a checkered past who he had hoped, with a recognizably American gallantry, to save. Joseph Cotten plays Martins as a man with experience of the world, but worldliness in the new United States is innocence in Vienna’s remnants of empire. From the moment he tries to track down the “third man” who saw Lime killed on the street, he is in over his head. What cements the film’s noir credentials is not the dark deeds or secrets but the absurdity in which Martins often unwittingly finds himself caught. Greene shows his literary roots when writing fellow author Martins, understanding that sometimes mortal peril is preferable to an author Q&A. Hence, Martins faking his way through a literary lecture to avoid the shadowy figures tailing him becomes one of the most tense, and funniest, scenes.
Yet neither Cotten, nor the mysterious Anna Schmidt (Valli), nor even Terence Howard’s wonderfully put-upon Major Calloway is the main attraction. The Third Man is an anomaly in Orson Welles’ filmography – an appearance in a film that he did not direct that nonetheless is as iconic as Citizen Kane and his many Shakespeare efforts. Part of this is notoriety: bad behavior on set, a notable distaste for the sewers that led to use of a body double in some shots. But Welles handily earns his third billing despite appearing in barely a third of the film. Rotating above Vienna’s ruined skyline in the Prater’s iconic ferris wheel, he muses on the tiny lives moving beneath him:
…in Italy for 30 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 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
Lime draws a colorful, unsubtle historical parallel that – despite many well-documented factual errors – has popular imagination on its side. With the cuckoo clock line a Welles invention, according to Greene, the mix of populism, charisma, and historical revisionism told with the panache of a true raconteur is as much a product of Welles’ offscreen persona as his onscreen characterization.
The decision to film for six weeks in Vienna in late autumn 1948 – barely postwar – provides a fascinating, though somewhat uneasy, historical document of the time. Some shots were on location, some in Sievering Studios, but it is not always immediately evident what rubble is the remnants of real homes and lives and what is a creation of the design team. Lime’s racket specifically targeted the vulnerable poor, selling counterfeit antibiotics that killed and disabled hundreds of children. The turning point in Martins’s allegiance is when he visits the hospital where the surviving children are cared for. Reed does not show us the victims, only Martins’s face and the teddy bear tied to the crib, both looking down at its inhabitant. The parallel to 2024, when people in Martins and Lime’s USA and Reed and Greene’s UK see the slaughter of children in war zones such as Gaza live on laptops and phones, is immediate and still uncomfortably relevant.
Yet, in the end, The Third Man maintains a clear-eyed look at humanity’s goodness as well as its flaws. When the film opens, a body floats in the Danube as children play on fallen bricks. In its ending minutes, justice has just about prevailed. There is a possibility of a better future (for some, at least), and any cynicism Martins takes on after seeing the complications of international jurisprudence and Lime’s suave and amoral trickery never wholly squashes his crime-writer instinct that the righteous will prevail. But then Schmidt – whose future remains uncertain as the film closes – walks by his grand gesture without a single word. Martins believes himself an actor in a great tragedy, but (with apologies to Greene’s one-time idol) he ends up a bit player in a farce.
“The Third Man” is streaming on Amazon Prime and Tubi.
