Few everymen in crime films have Martins\u2019 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\u2019s remnants of empire. From the moment he tries to track down the \u201cthird man\u201d who saw Lime killed on the street, he is in over his head. What cements the film\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yet neither Cotten, nor the mysterious Anna Schmidt (Valli), nor even Terence Howard\u2019s wonderfully put-upon Major Calloway is the main attraction. The Third Man<\/em> is an anomaly in Orson Welles\u2019 filmography \u2013 an appearance in a film that he did not direct that nonetheless is as iconic as Citizen Kane<\/em> 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\u2019s ruined skyline in the Prater\u2019s iconic ferris wheel, he muses on the tiny lives moving beneath him:<\/p>\n\n\n\n …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.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Lime draws a colorful, unsubtle historical parallel that \u2013 despite many well-documented factual errors<\/a> \u2013 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\u2019 offscreen persona as his onscreen characterization. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The decision to film for six weeks in Vienna in late autumn 1948 \u2013 barely postwar \u2013 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\u2019s racket specifically targeted the vulnerable poor, selling counterfeit antibiotics that killed and disabled hundreds of children. The turning point in Martins\u2019s allegiance is when he visits the hospital where the surviving children are cared for. Reed does not show us the victims, only Martins\u2019s 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\u2019s USA and Reed and Greene\u2019s UK see the slaughter of children in war zones such as Gaza live on laptops and phones, is immediate and still uncomfortably relevant.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet, in the end, The Third Man<\/em> maintains a clear-eyed look at humanity\u2019s 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\u2019s suave and amoral trickery never wholly squashes his crime-writer instinct that the righteous will prevail. But then Schmidt \u2013 whose future remains uncertain as the film closes \u2013 walks by his grand gesture without a single word. Martins believes himself an actor in a great tragedy, but (with apologies to Greene\u2019s one-time idol) he ends up a bit player in a farce.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The Third Man” is streaming on Amazon Prime<\/a> and Tubi<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/third-man1-1024x741.jpg\")
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