THE THIRD MAN (1949)

Along the dark streets of Vienna, evil men cast long shadows. Friends are revealed to be fragmentary, untrustworthy things, little more than vague silhouettes or a hazy memory of a picture seen once long ago. And love has its brains dashed against the pavement, left to bleed out into the underground sewers.

Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) has just arrived in Austria. He’s excited to meet his friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles), but there’s just one problem: he’s dead. Shocked by the news that his lifelong friend was killed in a car accident, Holly begins to suspect there’s something dubious about the witnesses’ stories. Deciding to stay in Vienna and investigate, Holly discovers a mystery that wasn’t supposed to be discovered…

The Third Man is argued to be the best British film ever made. There’s quite a lot of evidence to suggest it’s true. With a brooding atmosphere, exquisite cinematography, and a spectacular screenplay, The Third Man is a frightening portrayal of 20th-century nihilism, with existential ideas clouding traditional conceptions of morality. When villains are beloved, and heroes fall into despair, what kind of world are we living in?

A mad, sad, and bad one, that’s what. The bombed-out husk of Vienna, a corpse being slowly resuscitated, serves as our location. As people run through ruins, and pass by buildings that are little more than the skeletons of a society that once was, a terrible sense of uncertainty pervades our story: what, precisely, are we heading towards? In this crumbling world, heroes oscillate between post-war disillusionment and Cold War angst. A spectral figure climbs a pile of rubble, like a depraved phoenix rising from the ashes of the old, diseased world.

Whenever individuals take refuge inside, characters are swallowed by tall, ostentatious rooms. Or they disappear into the sewer system of Vienna, descending to the underworld like Orpheus’ quest to rescue Persephone. But they are only attempting to rescue themselves, to steal away from justice, or to capture the lifelong friends who have betrayed them. There is nothing romantic about Reed’s Vienna, with romance itself withering away into depression and despair.

Hell and Heaven are interchangeable. Death is a trivial matter, an awkward occurrence to which most remain indifferent. And when one looks for answers in Vienna, there is nothing to be found except for pain and regret: “Death is at the bottom of everything…” The past is a tragedy, the future too bleak to look at.

There’s a nihilistic claustrophobia that pervades Reed’s best film. Meaning is rendered as a nebulous relic, one that has been buried in the debris of Viennese buildings. Anything that had meant something before 1939 is now the soothing platitude of an old Western fable; human values and the sanctity of life are revealed to be a chimaera, an old wives’ tale told to children before bed. There is no such thing as decent men—only those who take what they want: “Holly, you and I aren’t heroes. The world doesn’t make any heroes… not outside your stories…”

Nothing good can grow in Carol Reed’s Vienna. Perhaps nothing moral or honourable can ever form anywhere again, with the fear and paranoia that infuses the distrustful Cold War climate. Harry Lime is a virulent weed, a suffocating, stifling ivy that has grown its tendrils around the throat of the new world. He maintains that this is all a man can do in the society they are living in: “Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t. Why should we?” The horrors of the early-20th-century cannot simply be forgotten; the terrors of World War II cannot merely be returned to the Pandora’s box from which they sprung.

Europe is shown to be irrevocably changed, scarred, and wounded. Depravity is morally justifiable through existential reasoning. “Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you £20,000 for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?” Psychopathy becomes ideology, solipsism a badge of honour.   

Lime isn’t the man whom Holly remembers. These evil tenets of a dark philosophy reveal him to be something transformed, a disturbed, unfeeling entity. He’s the Frankenstein’s Monster of a new epoch; he is not fashioned from new cadavers, but he is creating them, devouring their souls for nourishment. Holly never had a friend like Lime—but suppose he never even knew him? “I knew him for 20 years—at least, I thought I knew him. Suppose he was laughing at fools like us all the time?”

Perhaps Reed is suggesting that we can never truly know someone, nor what they are capable of in the direst of environments. Lime knows the world to be a cold, dismal place, one that is best when left altogether. At one point in our story, a character softly intones: “Humanity… is a duty.” But depending on one’s perspective, how one fulfils their duty to mankind can vary: “The dead are happier dead. They don’t miss much here, poor devils.”

This sentiment reflects Harry’s treatment of others: his underground penicillin racket claims the lives of many. As men with gangrene, women in childbirth, and sick infants use Lime’s diluted medicine, only the fortunate lose their lives—the unlucky ones survive, and lose their minds. A sequence at a children’s hospital shows the wreckage left behind in the wake of one man’s greed: a teddy bear left unclaimed on the floor.

In a famous monologue, Lime suggests that such periods of turmoil throughout history lead to great men, great art, and a richer society as a result: “In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance.” Though Lime is injecting chaos into the world, he believes the strong will rise with him. Without his altruistic immorality, we would be doomed to a world with the cuckoo clock as our crowning achievement.

In Carol Reed’s masterpiece, characters lie incessantly, concealing the truth at every turn. Things are left unsaid, with the terrifying truth being hinted at with mere facial expressions. Doubts and concerns are closer to the truth than the official story, meaning Vienna becomes a microcosm for the Cold War world of treachery and deceit. Conspiracies dwell just beneath the surface: “I wondered about it a hundred times—if it really was an accident…”

And a mystery shows the first signs of unravelling: “There was a third man…” One thread leads to another, but Graham Greene’s story has an unusually slow start. It isn’t until the 45-minute mark that we are shown something concrete, with our MacGuffin being slowly divulged in the most expertly cinematic of ways: one of the most iconic visages in all of film history is illuminated by a light being turned on in the dead of night.

Film noir has often made use of such atmospheric, chiaroscuro lighting. The visual iconography of the genre reaches its zenith in this unsettling tale of deception and betrayal. A man slips into the shadows, only his shoes being visible in the Viennese lamplight. Our protagonist is chased by malicious forces of evil through a tenebrous city. And fog that rises like the fingers, clutching our hero, dragging him down into the dark depths of the criminal realm.

Much like the mirror in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960), the introduction of a seemingly innocuous prop infers devastating plot information. An unfriendly, aloof cat toying with a man’s shoelaces expertly reveals one of the story’s most dramatic points: Harry Lime is alive, stalking Holly as he drunkenly makes his way through Austria’s capital. Unfortunately, distributors did a good job of spoiling this twist by placing Orson Welles’ face on the poster, but the moment is sublimely cinematic nonetheless.

Reed’s film begins with one of the hallmarks of the film noir genre: the voiceover. However, it quickly discards this narrative device, and The Third Man reveals itself to be a unique addition to the noir canon. The search for truth is abandoned halfway through the story, when it’s suddenly revealed with immense force. Instead of our hero and heroine falling into each other’s arms, they remain estranged. Instead of a second smile, Anna (Alida Valli) sheds a single, solitary tear. And just when we think our would-be lovers will finally embrace, they part ways forever, indelibly marked by the harrowing events that have transpired.

The Third Man is arguably one of the most beautiful things put to celluloid. Robert Krasker’s cinematography features a collection of uncomfortable close-ups, with the stretched smiles of antagonistic forces being far too prominent on the screen for the viewer to relax. The framing and shot selection share a nightmarish quality with the films of the German Expressionists.

Perhaps what is spoken about most in The Third Man is the unnerving angles that incessantly bombard the viewer, almost as though it’s insisting you turn your head to meet the image, putting you off kilter. Much like how French Impressionists believed that an image was capable of conveying mood, texture, and ambiguity, Krasker and Reed’s canted framing crafts an atmosphere of inescapable paranoia and discomfiting situations. The entire film feels like an anxiety-ridden fever dream, like a hellish, cinematic version of M.C Escher’s “Relativity” (1953).

Some weren’t as impressed by this stylistic choice. The famed director and Reed’s good friend, William Wyler, sent him a package after he saw the film. Inside was a spirit level with a letter that read: “Carol, next time you make a picture, just put it on top of the camera, will you?” But this stylistic aberration was so influential, that one can see how it influenced the genre post-1949.

The unsettling quality of the cinematography is compounded by the rather bizarre choice of music; Anton Karas’ zither creates a score that is oddly disconcerting. It seems a strange choice for a thriller, though film critic Roger Ebert thought it was surprisingly fitting: “Has there ever been a film where the music more perfectly suited the action than in Carol Reed’s The Third Man?”

Reed’s film excels at crafting an unflinching look at one of the world’s darkest moments. There is an omnipresent gloominess to the story; villainy is narrowly thwarted, yet we feel just as bleak. An immovable cloud of existential despair hangs over us all the same. Any attempt to rectify wrongs amounts to a futile endeavour, and mistakes are shown to be tragically final. There is no escape, nowhere safe; freedom is delusive.

In one of the film’s most memorable sequences, our villain is chased through the cavernous underground sewer system in Vienna. He is hunted among the rat-infested channels, like a fox hounded by bloodthirsty dogs. Harry’s fingers probe through a sewer grate, trying to feel the wind one final time. But it is too late: gone, done, finished. Friends and executors become the same, walking away from their ruinous lives, enshrouded in mist.

UK • USA | 1949 | 104 MINUTES | 1.37:1 | BLACK & WHITE | ENGLISH • GERMAN RUSSIAN • FRENCH

Cast & Crew

director: Carol Reed.
writer: Graham Greene.
starring: Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard, Ernst Deutsch & Paul Hörbiger.