The Third Man (1949)
Reed’s film noir exploration of crime and ethics in post-war Vienna
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Country: United Kingdom/Austria
Director: Carol Reed
Time: 1 hour and 44 minutes
Where Can I Get It: Criterion (free w/subscription), Amazon ($3.99 to rent)
What It Evokes: Post-war Vienna, film noir, Orson Welles’ greatness, ethics in unethical worlds
Vienna, 1948: Two men ride a Ferris wheel to its pinnacle above Prater Park. They look down at the children playing beneath them. From this vantage, the children appear to be nothing more than moving dots. “If I offered you $20,000 for every dot that stopped moving, would you really tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spend?” Harry Lime is asking the question. He’s supposed to be dead. His interlocutor, Holly Martins, recoils in disbelief. Lime continues unperturbed, “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.”1 Welcome to The Third Man.
In March 1945, Anne O’Hare McCormick, the first woman to win a Pulitzer for journalism, wrote for the New York Times, “The human problem the war will leave behind it has not yet been imagined, much less faced by anybody. There has never been such destruction, such disintegration of the structure of life.” Indeed, the very familiarity of images featuring bombed out city blocks and underfed civilians in various forms of transit following the war’s cessation (in addition to celebrating GIs and American ticker tape parades) can hide the sheer magnitude of human movement, let alone suffering and loss, that the war and its immediate aftermath provoked. Too often treated as runway for the robust European economic growth that pervaded the 1950s, the immediate post-war period—the Marshall Plan did not begin disbursing funds until 1948—remained a time of disjunctures and dislocations in the wake of near total societal collapse.
Today, UNHCR often notes that more people are displaced by conflict (an estimated 89.3 million at the end of 2021) than at any point since WW2. It takes nothing from (very real) contemporary problems to note the staggering magnitude of human dispersion that resulted from the war: 25 million homeless in the Soviet Union, 20 million in Germany. Between 1944-1945 alone, France lost 500,000 homes. In the USSR, 70,000 villages and 1,700 towns were completely destroyed. No conflict killed and moved so many people in such short a time. The immediate aftermath might have been better than the war, but not always by very much.2 In 1945, one third of the population of Piraeus, Greece suffered from trachoma. In 1946, one in three people in Poland caught tuberculosis. According to Czechoslovakian health authorities, 700,000 children in that country suffered from the same disease that year. In Berlin, an outbreak of dysentery in 1945 caused by damaged sewer systems led to 66 infant deaths for every 100 births. Ten people per day died of malnutrition in the city’s Lehtrer railway station. In Vienna, 87,000 women were treated at clinics and by doctors after having been raped by Soviet troops, while infant mortality rose to more than four times its 1938 rate. In countries where the war had been relatively less devastating, deprivation persisted. Meat rationing in the UK would end only in 1954. The list could go on and on.3 Even after peace, life came and went cheap. Social and economic structures had indeed disintegrated. Within conditions where survival remained paramount, what did ethics matter?
In 1948, the novelist Graham Greene traveled to Vienna after being tasked with writing a screenplay for Carol Reed. Since July 1945, the city had been administered through four zones of occupation: French, English, American, and Soviet. By the end of 1947, citizens of the city still subsisted on less than 2,000 calories per day—what American administrators termed “near-starvation diets.” The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration administered 64% of those calories. Vienna continued to experience persistent coal shortages, leaving heating intermittent. On his visit to the city, Greene met the central European correspondent for The Times, who introduced him to the flourishing black market. (Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1978 masterpiece The Marriage of Maria Braun, which touches on similar themes, highlights the flourishing German version of this post-war phenomenon.) Greene wrote a novella, then a screenplay. Carol Reed shot the film on location, where he hardly needed to construct sets to capture damaged buildings or to search for impoverished street children. Their work would culminate in one of the greatest films ever made.
The Third Man leverages the cynicism inherent in film noir to surface hard questions about ethics and survival under conditions of extreme duress. Holly Martins, an American writer of pulp westerns, travels to Vienna on the invitation of his friend, Harry Lime. Upon his arrival, he learns that Lime has been killed in a car accident, leaving behind his lover Anna Schmidt. Naturally, Holly falls hopelessly in love with Anna. Naturally, Anna still loves Lime. (A refugee herself, Anna lacks papers allowing her to stay in the city’s western zones and remains under constant threat of being deported to Vienna’s Soviet-controlled environs.) Rather quickly, it becomes clear that Lime’s associates, who testify to having been present during his death, can’t quite keep their story straight. Something doesn’t add up. The eponymous third man, who helped carry the (putatively) dead Lime away from the accident scene, has disappeared. (Lime is played by Orson Welles, so don’t worry he’s not dead. Indeed, Welles’ entrance may be the greatest introduction of a star in a supporting role in film history.) Slowly, Holly Martins begins to unravel the story: Lime had been adulterating medicine and selling it to desperate families on the black market. People began to notice. After Lime resurfaces, Martins agrees to try to work with the authorities to help capture him in order to stave off Anna’s move to the Soviet sector. As usual in the hard-boiled world of noir, things never go quite to plan.
The Third Man’s cinematic impact has been enormous. Like Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945), the film helped set the tone for future neo-realist works by forgoing studio sets in favor of location shoots. The work’s infectious soundtrack, a bare zither tune, consciously rejected the more dramatic (and overwrought) musical scores that had dominated British and American film of the time in favor of impressionistic and bare sounds, augmenting scenes’ emotional tenor without artificially overpowering them. Visually, Reed employed lenses and frames that distorted space, reinforcing the perturbed state of Holly Martins in a scarred Vienna, while consciously drawing on German Expressionism’s starkly luminous contrasts—the final scene (set in Vienna’s sewer system) remains a particular rich example and may be one of the greatest sequences in cinematic history. Each of these aspects combine to particularize a distraught and distressed world attempting to mend its social and ethical fabrics following near total collapse. In so doing, the film manages to depict something much more universal.
Go Down The Rabbit Hole:
Carol Reed — Odd Man Out (1947)
Carol Reed — Our Man In Havana (1959)
Perhaps the greatest ad-lib in film history? Orson Welles added these words during the scene’s shooting—though claimed to have heard them elsewhere first. The statement’s provenance remains uncertain.
This is clearly not true for POWs, individuals in concentration camps, and soldiers and citizens in the line of fire.
I have stolen these numbers from the first chapter of Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005). Ditto for the next paragraph.
Thanks for the incisive analysis of one of my favorite films.