The Third Man At 75: How A Bombed-Out Vienna Helped Create A Gripping Post-War Thriller

(MENAFN- The Conversation) A narrow, dimly lit street, night time, post-war Vienna. American hack novelist Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) is slightly inebriated. He hears someone shuffle in a dark doorway. The countenance of the concealed man is briefly illuminated by an apartment light. It is a man he had presumed dead: his old friend Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles. In an instant, the scene provides one of the most iconic moments of 20th-century cinema.

Lime dashes from the doorway and Martins pursues the fugitive along dark rain-soaked streets. But he is only chasing a shadow, cast monstrously high and uneven on the facades of buildings. He turns into a deserted plaza, but Lime has vanished. Martins is too late.

Director Carol Reed's The Third Man delights in the idea of being too late. He had visited Vienna with writer Graham Greene in June 1948 to complete a first draft of the screenplay, and the two were instantly seduced by the war-torn city and its enigmatic inhabitants.

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They were too late to experience the cultural magnificence of the Hapsburg Empire , of which the city had been the capital. Instead, the director and novelist revelled in the inspiration they found in the seedier corners of a rubble-strewn Vienna.

Here was a city politically divided and policed by the allied forces , a mosaic of identities of settled and unsettled veterans and victims of the Nazi regime, of black markets, double-dealings and dodgy characters. Reed's cinematic creativity had always been stimulated by locations – the dingier, the better. Even the trivial details of a place enhanced his filmmaking.

His literary collaborator had a reputation for a similar sensibility, and for dexterously interweaving textures of location, characterisation and narrative. Producer Alexander Korda sent Greene on a trip to Vienna and Rome for research in February 1948. Korda reckoned that post-war Rome had provided the best of contemporary Italian filmmakers – Rossellini, De Sica, Fellini – with a clear stylistic identity.

Location shooting, the use of non-professional actors and a harnessing of Rome's organic rhythms had given Italian films an immediacy and honest personality. However, Greene never needed Rome as a muse. When he visited Vienna, he found so many of the same attributes, and the story came to him almost fully formed. The characteristics of Greene's urban portrait suited Carol Reel perfectly.

The story begins with the arrival in Vienna of lowbrow fiction writer Holly Martins, who has come at the invitation of an old school friend, Harry Lime. In the opening scenes he learns that he is too late: Lime has just been fatally knocked down by a truck and his remains removed in a coffin.

Details of the event are vague and offered only reluctantly by witnesses. These ambiguous accounts intrigue Martins, who questions the coincidental presence of Lime's associates at the very moment of the accident, and the identity of an enigmatic shady character, referred to as“the third man”.

The curious writer is drawn into the mystery, meeting a miscellany of eccentric and dubious characters, including Lime's lover, the actress Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli). He gradually discovers that his old schoolmate had been running a complex black market contraband operation and had been dodging the police.

They, too, have been pursuing only an elusive shadow, and this cat-and-mouse game provides much of the dramatic tension of the film. On the morning after the revelation that Lime is still alive, Martins leads the investigating Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) to the plaza where Lime disappeared.

Calloway opens a concealed door in a kiosk to reveal a set of steps down into the byzantine network of Vienna's sewer system. Those labyrinthine tunnels will provide the backdrop for the film's climactic chase sequence, but also mirror the twists and turns, dark characterisations and fragmented dead ends of Greene and Reed's overground narrative.

With its pervasive existential angst, duplicitous personalities, low-lit cityscape, and awkward triangulated relationship between Lime's charismatic villain, his femme fatale lover Anna, and the rudderless Martins, The Third Man could be a film noir . However, it's likely that the film is too late for that designation.

As Michael Curtiz did with Casablanca in 1942, Reed displaces elements of the genre from its typical American setting and allows the aesthetics, personalities and atmosphere of the“foreign” city to colour the film.

Tonally, the film deftly weaves a light comedic note with disturbing sinister elements. Harry Lime's egocentric touch of evil is dreadfully revealed when Martins is brought to a children's hospital ward where victims of impure, black-market penicillin are being treated. He witnesses a teddy bear being thrown away, its little owner having succumbed to the illegally peddled poisonous medication.

Reed seamlessly blends a medley of what should be incongruous parts into a coherent mosaic. Even the acclaimed theme by zither player Anton Karas (over which concern was expressed by movie executives), should not belong in this film. But it works. The piece topped the charts with ubiquitous popularity in both Britain and America.

In 75 years, the Karas tune has become as indelibly linked to the ambience of the film as Welles' iconic first appearance, Anna's final exit and Lime's sardonic remark on neutral Switzerland:“In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

In a film where so much happens too late, it's perhaps fitting that the villain – who has evaded arrest, manipulated his friends, betrayed his lover and defied death – disparagingly dismisses the“brotherly love” of Switzerland in the same breath that he mocks the timepiece as its only noteworthy achievement.

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