The Third Man

The Third Man – Carol Reed’s 1949 thriller is a film that I always expect to enjoy more than I do. Everyone knows this picture featuring a bravura cameo by a smirking, pudgy-looking Orson Welles playing Harry Lime, a loathsome black market trafficker in adulterated penicillin. No point is served by reiterating plot points or commenting on the beautiful photography. On second and third and fourth viewings, the zither score seems intrusive and, perhaps, not well calculated although, of course, the film is almost as famous for its soundtrack as for Welles’ performance. Joseph Cotten is dull in this picture; his muted, rather gay-inflected, acting is designed to offset the exuberance of Welles’ work, but since Cotten is on-screen for most of the film, the picture drags. On this watching, I noticed that the movie is designed along two axes – the horizontal axis, which comprises most of the film, is occupied by the detective story, Cotten’s hack novelist pursuing clues from location to location and witness to witness as to the identity of the mysterious “third man. Mystery stories, in general, operate horizontally – that is one thing leads to another in a narrative structure that resembles a processions of details spread out across the landscape of ruined Vienna. Welles’ Harry Lime, however, operates vertically. He takes Cotten’s character up in the Prater ferris wheel both to menace him, but also, like Christ on the Mount of Quarantine, to satanically tempt him. Lime says that if you could be paid $20,000 for pushing a button a making one of the pedestrians below vanish, you would be sorely tempted to push that button and, thereby earn that blood money. Later, we see Welles’ brooding over the city from a terrace wrecked by bombing – he looks down into a schematic of the café and street where the climactic encounter will take place. Finally, everyone remembers the climax of the film which takes place in a Piranesi-like carceri of foaming sewers, a “chutes and ladders” landscape of obcure, black ups and downs. Lime’s speech about “making a dot (he means a pedestrian as seen from high above) disappear” embodies the logic of aerial bombardment and, in some respects, the movie can be viewed as commentary on the bombing campaign that destroyed Europe’s cities – destruction abundantly apparent in the imagery of the ravaged Vienna featured in this film.