The first time you see THE
THIRD MAN (1949) by director Carol Reed, you’re tempted to believe that you
discovered it and no one else knows how fantastically good it is. But smarter, better-informed people
than you and me are already in the know.
Mamoun Hassan, international
film educator and former head of the British Film Institute, taught a
Masterclass at the International Film School in Cuba earlier this year, citing the best directors of British cinema and urging
greater awareness for Carol Reed:
“You
will have heard of David Lean because he has his champions – one of them a very
famous champion: Steven Spielberg.
You will have heard of Michael Powell and [Emeric] Pressburger, [they
have] a champion and that is Martin Scorsese. And Hitchcock…doesn’t need any champions because … most
directors want to make a Hitchcockian film. He’s constantly being re-examined so the filmmakers are
keeping him in the public eye.
That leaves Carol Reed.
Most of you don’t know Carol Reed…He needs his champions.”
Director Peter Bogdanovich,
in the introduction to the Criterion Collection release of THE THIRD MAN, conjectured
on what holds back popular perception of Reed:
“Carol
Reed is one of those underrated directors who was highly thought of during this
lifetime, but since he passed away, nobody much talks about him. Probably because the last few films he
made were not among his best, even though they were among his most successful. “
My own belief is that Carol
Reed is difficult to rip off. His
work in THE THIRD MAN is so specific, and yet, you can’t easily recreate
it. He makes David Lean, Powell
and Pressburger, and Hitchcock — all of them brilliant craftsmen and endlessly
skilled— seem overtly cribable.
Lean is your man for landscapes; Powell and Pressburger give you
storybook-like drama in saturated colors; Hitchcock is a master of
suspense. Carol Reed, however,
said he tried not to repeat himself with his films and thus avoided set
categories for his style: “I don’t
think a director should stand out…The audience should be unconscious that the
damned thing’s been directed at all.”
[PLEASE NOTE: SPOILERS AHEAD. I will keep it to a minimum, but
there’s no way to avoid everything.]
The more I summarize the
story of THE THIRD MAN, the less you actually need. It’s better to watch it yourself. Still, it’s useful enough to tell you this much: an American
named Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) arrives in post-WW2 Vienna to reconnect
with his old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles), only to find that Harry may be
involved in some treachery. To
complicate matters, Martins also falls for Harry’s girl, Anna Schmidt (Alida
Valli).
There is a sense from the
very beginning that this story is something of a lark. The zither music underscoring the
opening credits is largely responsible for that. It sounds like we’re about to embark on a musical comedy,
not a film noir of disreputable criminals and ill-fated protagonists (which is what THE THIRD MAN really is). The film’s opening also employs a
voiceover narration to introduce Vienna and the multiple foreign powers controlling
it. The narrator (never identified
in the film, though it’s actually Carol Reed himself) seemingly then digresses
from generalities to tell us about Holly Martins who arrives “happy as a lark
and without a cent”. The
impression is that we’re in for an amusing story, one that can be told over
drinks at the pub.
For a while, it is fun to
play detective with Holly Martins who’s trying to find out the real state of
affairs involving his pal Harry Lime.
There are interviews with shady characters, mysterious deaths and
disappearances, chases down wet, cobblestoned streets at night, and time spent
trying to prove an irritatingly self-assured British major (Trevor Howard)
wrong. But you’ll find
yourself thinking of the old warning given by supervising adults to children:
it’s all fun and games, until someone gets hurt.
Martins certainly comes up
against the hard truth, but the tone of the film remains a very intriguing
thing. Anton Karas continues to
play zither music, but not the jaunty, cheerful theme of the opening
credits. The music quivers,
instead, with embarrassment and resignation as Holly Martins faces the truth
and his impotence to make things better. The irony of his life is probably amusing to outsiders, but
for him, it’s humiliating and disillusioning.
The cosmic joke of Martins’
life is also paralleled in Carol Reed’s depiction of Vienna. The city is not a
place where dreams come true — rather, it’s here that they come to be torn away by rough reality. Vienna provides
a circus-variety of faces and characters.
The porter at Harry Lime’s apartment building charmingly stumbles with
his English but reveals deadly details to Martins that the police don’t know
about; an adorable chubby-cheeked toddler persists in pointing Martins out as a
murderer; and an impossibly-old man attempts to sell balloons to the police
during a tense stakeout. At one
point, there’s even a uniformed man walking around with a Hitler mustache.
This carnival nightmare
atmosphere is essential to Carol Reed’s genius. A serious game is being played, but the protagonists lose
their bearings and maneuver clumsily.
Reed famously uses crooked (dutch) camera angles to show how off-kilter
things are. In one particular
scene (reminiscent of one in Hitchcock’s THE 39 STEPS), Holly Martins must give
a talk about being a writer. It’s
a nightmare scenario for any writer to be put on the spot and made to justify
themselves in front of a strange audience. It’s made worse for Martins because he’s trying to make
sense of a crime and one of the criminals is questioning him. Reed duly films Joseph Cotten at a
cocked angle.
Irreverent black humor is
worked into the dialogue, throughout the film. Holly Martins is taken aback by the British manner of
speaking about death: “Is that
what you say to people after death?
‘Goodness, that’s awkward?’ ”
And later, when Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) wants Martins safely out
of the way, he says, “I don’t want another murder in this case and you were
born to be murdered.”
This brand of humor works
because of the world writer Graham Greene created with this story and others in
his oeuvre — the cloak and dagger, the ironies, the self doubt, the would-be
and aborted romances, and perhaps most importantly, being too clever for your
own good. Other directors got a
fair approximation of Graham’s virtuosity, but Carol Reed is the director who nailed
it and got the best mileage. Just
prior to THE THIRD MAN, Green and Reed successfully collaborated on THE FALLEN
IDOL (1948), but it’s THE THIRD MAN that creates the greatest frisson in the
imagination.
There’s no doubt that Carol
Reed set a standard that influenced other filmmakers. Next time, I’d like to talk about several films that
demonstrate some of the flair for irony, criminality, humor, and a sense of
place so indelibly immortalized by THE THIRD MAN.
###
Sources:
Mamoun Hassan website:
February 2013 – Introduction
to The Third Man Masterclass
(International Film School,
Cuba)
DVD:
“The Third Man” [2-Disc
Edition], Criterion Collection, 2007.
Book:
Drazin, Charles, In Search
of The Third Man, Limelight Editions, 1999.
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