The Third Man (1949)

If you’re engag­ing in a dis­cus­sion about the great­est films pro­duced on these fair isles and The Third Man goes unmen­tioned for more than… two min­utes, then sor­ry, but you’re doing it all wrong. Pristine­ly restored and re-released in the UK, Car­ol Reed’s cre­pus­cu­lar 1949 mas­ter­work only matures with age, its themes becom­ing more frag­ile and illu­sive the clos­er we get to it. Like Orson Welles’ own Touch of Evil, to come in 1958, this is a film which does away with such cretinous inani­ty as offer­ing up good­ies and bad­dies, instead pre­sent­ing its cast of char­ac­ters as doing things which they believe to be good, but are not seen as such through the eyes of observers.

The polit­i­cal­ly tem­pera­men­tal set­ting of post-war Vien­na is vital to the story’s telling, a city par­tial­ly lev­elled by its Sovi­et sav­iours in a bid to dri­ve out Nazi occu­piers, but a city that’s mid-restora­tion and open to those chancers want­i­ng to take advan­tage of a sys­tem of emer­gency bureau­cra­cy. Har­ry Lime (Welles) took such a chance, and paid dear­ly for it, now stiff in a box and six feet under. His old pal Hol­ly Mar­tins (Joseph Cot­ton), a dime­store nov­el­ist and yank ex-pat, can’t quite fath­om how this could hap­pen to such a slick oper­a­tor, a man who has his­tor­i­cal­ly danced through the rain­drops, and in far more test­ing times. No longer able to accept the job that Har­ry had promised him upon arrival (but of which no actu­al details were revealed), Hol­ly has noth­ing else to do but relent to his pri­mal detec­tive instincts and find out if there has been any foul play in his old pal’s death.

Know­ing that Orson Welles stars in the film and is unlike­ly to be play­ing a char­ac­ter who dies pri­or to the film’s time­line, Reed teas­es and teas­es by con­stant­ly assur­ing that Lime is dead, mak­ing Hol­ly (and, by exten­sion, the audi­ence) more intrigued in how this char­ac­ter will end up mak­ing a grand appear­ance. In the eyes of the law, Har­ry is a bad per­son who deserves to be dead. Yet, as we dis­cov­er, he was per­haps not a man of out­ward mal­ice, even though he didn’t opt to car­ry out his deal­ings the most legit­i­mate of ways. The malev­o­lence in The Third Man is cap­i­tal­ism, which is iron­ic giv­en that the ter­ri­to­ry has been com­man­deered by US allies. The nature of Lime’s crime is a ques­tion of basic moral­i­ty which is mud­died to near-total obscu­ri­ty by time and by place.

Har­ry Lime intones a famous mono­logue from atop Vienna’s still-oper­a­tional Wiener Fer­ris Wheel where he com­pares the peo­ple down on the ground to insignif­i­cant ants. It’s a pow­er­ful image, reflec­tive of a cal­lous atti­tude that’s almost a neces­si­ty if you want to enter into a pro­fes­sion where what you do has an effect on a wide, unseen swathe of soci­ety. When the bombs fell on Vien­na, those they fell on where mere ants, hap­less­ly crawl­ing as they met with their doom, sent to them by men who were only try­ing to help.