The Harry Lime Hypothesis

Midway through The Third Man, Holly Martins announces to a meeting of Vienna's literary scene that his next book will be a clean break with the trivialities that marked his previous works with a more serious story called, aptly enough, "The Third Man". The piece, some reviewers have noted, marks the central maturation in Holly Martins as he comes to understand the complexity of collective responsibility and the myth of the romantic hero. This is simple enough. More interesting, however, is the way in which Holly's interactions with Anna and Harry change over the course of the film especially near its conclusion. Anna asks Harry, for example, "What's your price this time?.... You must be proud to be a police informer." While her agenda obviously leads her to this statement as Harry's mistress, her point remains--all the characters in The Third Man are marionettes of larger forces at play, including the zeitgeist of the post-war era. This devaluation of the individual surfaces again at the end of the film's famous chase through Vienna's sewers, where a wounded and exhausted Harry Lime signals Holly to shoot him as though to give a proper ending to Harry's saga. Collectivized responsibility seems to mean collectivization in general--here, Harry Lime completes his role in the story in deference to some kind of collective will.

Anna comes out of this as the emblem of the drifting individual. The closing scene aptly captures this--she slowly approaches the stationary camera head on, growing from one of Harry Lime's dots to her full figure. Her attachment to Harry, borne out of her rescue from repatriation to the Russian sector, makes her the modern Antigone in the words of one critic and does perhaps redeem her. Her character's oblique reference to the Prague Coup of 1948, for example, allows us to sympathize with her plight. There is also something compelling in her indictment of Holly. His betrayal of his best friend is no small task, and it comes in the service of enforcers of justice who have lost much of their legitimacy. The black market is not some fringe phenomenon in Vienna after all, and those who attempt to control it fail to understand the desperation of the times. 

Like the other two films studied in my group, this adds the central dimension of tragedy to The Third Man. The tragedy itself becomes the lamentation of the film, not the compromises made by individual characters. If there is one glimmer of hope it comes, ironically, from Harry Lime himself. His suggestion from his famous cuckoo-clock speech, that good and evil can be magnified by each other, seems to ring true in the sentiments of Holly Martin's new book. Is evil necessary for their to be good, and can laying evil bare create virtue? Perhaps. But this old idea better fits Renaissance Florence than post-war Italy in film's perspective.

Cynicism and Hope in Post-War Film

I find it interesting that Alex and I have each noted that our films carry a deeply cynical and gritty tone toward the war while Justine's has a more hopeful view. This suggests with respect to Italy that the country escaped the crippling feelings of national guilt that other Axis powers had to confront in the wake of WWII. Italy never carried out anything like Hitler's Final Solution, so perhaps it escaped the moral condemnation and humiliation that Germany received and was thus able to recover psychologically more quickly. Das Boot, on the other hand, seems to cast the submarine crew as appendages of the German war machine and focuses on the ordeal they endured as pawns of the Third Reich. My film takes a cynical view not because of defeat, but because of the readily apparent hollowness of the Allied victory--WWII had not ended but seamlessly shifted east to the borders of the USSR. 

More on the Context of the Third Man

The writer of The Third Man's screenplay, Graham Greene, never intended the film to be a political piece. Greene was quoted as saying, "My only intention was to amuse.... I didn't want to provoke political sentiments." Reed's modifications to Greene's script transformed The Third Man into an intellectual work and expose its relationship to its historical context. The most significant change Reed made was to change film's tenor toward Holly Martins. Its unflattering view of the naïve, inexperienced, unworldly Martins contrasts its positive view of Calloway, the British MP attempting to police the wreckage of Vienna, and to a lesser extent Anna. It should be noted, however, that Anna herself is a participant in the same underground trade as all of our civilian protagonists--it is a fact of life that lends an overall palor to the film rather than a morally ambiguous realism. As the same essay quoted above argues (persuasively, in my opinion), the film's tone toward its American characters exemplifies Britain's frustration at the wartime cooperation and accommodation of the Soviet Union by the U.S.. However, the film retains some of Greene's imprints. Some commentators have characterized The Third Man as a lament of totalized war and its dehumanizing effects on all parties. Harry Lime, who interestingly is never given a nationality or any other real identity other than his criminal enterprise and connection to Martins, is this universal representative of what remains in the aftermath of the war. He is the prototypical anti-hero, a man Nietzscheof whom would be proud, with the force of his persona counterbalanced against the sadness of his situation. He is not the villain in this tale because we identify with his inner contradiction--he at once seems to transcend his surroundings with his aloof spirit and slick talk but is firmly a product of the toxic milieu in which he prowls. 

European vs. American narrative styles

In both its American and English versions, The Third Man opens with a voice-over. They are not identical, however. As compared here, the two monologues diverge in tone and purpose. The British version was voiced by the director, while the American used Holly Martins, the American author--an omniscient narrator vs. the protagonist. The unseen voice in the British version, as the same source notes, employs irony and understatement to set a dark and uncertain mood at the film's outset. For example, while speaking of the multi-national police force that controlled the city's center, it reads, "Good fellows on the whole, did their best you know." Compare this to the American version's "But they were good fellows on the whole and did their best." In the former, the ambiguity remains--it comes across as the narrator's opinion and not as fact. The American version firmly establishes them as the good guys in this story and removes any wiggle room.

These two styles come into conflict within The Third Man, but ultimately British sensibilities prevail. There is no clear resolution to Holly Martin's journey and the piece leaves the viewer with an abidingly cynical view toward the power politics and murky characters trying to sort themselves out in the shadows of "the old Vienna."

Real-Life Inspirations for The Third Man

The writer of The Third Man, Graham Greene, had a firm basis in espionage that the brought to bear in his piece. While the film is not explicitly a spy story, its portrait of the black market in Vienna gives it the same overall quality. The black market, like espionage, involves men in constantly perilous, extra-legal environments, dealing in goods and services beneath the table. Greene himself had worked as an intelligence officer for the British during World War II at the behest of his younger sister, an MI6 operative, and his elder brother had spied for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. Greene also employed contacts in the London Times and MI6 for background research on the occupation of Vienna and the criminal underworld it had spawned. Events in the film, like Harry Lime's penicillin racket, were not pulled out of a hat--they reflected the reality of an economy dominated by rationing and chronic shortages where criminals like Lime provided a useful and necessary public service.

The Social Context of Post-War Noir

Post-war cinema in Hollywood was by and large triumphalistic. Film noir, however, ran in largely the opposite direction. Instead of glorious optimism, noir expressed the ambient uneasiness and fear of the post-war environment where the menace of the Axis powers had been supplanted by Soviet Russia. Disillusionment emerged on domestic issues as well, such as in works like The Blue Dahlia (1946), which depicts the plight of a betrayed WWII veteran. As self-censorship began to move Hollywood away from social content in the early 1950s, film noir remained American cinema's lone contribution of social criticism to popular culture. The Stranger (1946), for example, the story of an American hunting down Nazi fugitives, was the first American film to depict footage of German concentration camps, according to this. Rather than the unbounded heroism and exaltation of the individual that came out of boilerplate westerns and feel-good films of the 1940s, noir presented a sinister, corrupt, and deterministic world where the protagonist is not the hero but the object of some larger, unseen design.

In terms of visual style, noir drew heavily upon the German expressionist style created by directors like Fritz Lang in the 1920s. The two genres shared a remarkable similarity in their content as expressionism emerged to communicate the despair and humilliating misery of post-war Germany.

Women up to French Revolution

Some key points:

Renaissance: humanism and education are for men only. Little attention given by Renaissance thinkers to women, and people like Albert (in On the Family) explicitly argue that women should be relegated to the domestic sphere exclusively. He writes, "I considered it safer to have her unable, and not merely unwilling, to harm me." whoa!

Reformation: The Reformation (perhaps as part of a larger "modern" sensibility) looks at men and women as sexual beings that must be controlled. Even though there is a "priesthood of all believers" and spiritual equity, there is no sexual equality. Men need women they can control to satisfy their sexual appetites so they don't promote sin and vice through prostitution and whatnot, and women need to be firmly subservient to their husbands for similar reasons. The family becomes an essential fixture of Reformation thought as such.

Also, convents are closed down (as church properties are seized) as "unnatural." A huge source of female independence is lost. Counter-Reformation emphasizes female saints as a counterpoint, such as St. Teresa (of the eponymous sculpture The Ecstasy of St. Teresa).

Women in high office: act like men. Elizabeth the Great becomes a near-androgynous being and isn't afraid to roll the proverbial hard six with the Spanish and Mary, Queen of Scots. Catherine the Great ruthlessly crushes Pugachev rebellion, acts decisively toward Poland. 

Style and The Cold War in "The Third Man"

One of the most distinctive aspects of The Third Man is its style. Its highly stylized cinematography took inspiration from the German Expressionists of the 1920s, using techniques such as the dramatic contrast expressed in the still above. Harry Lime's smirk stands alone among the gloomy ruins of Vienna, highlighting how he transcends the misery of his surroundings and, shall we say, his full embrace of his own "will to power." The camera finds itself listing to the side much of the time and the bizarre geometries of the city clash and slice across the light and shadow, creating a city one senses has truly "lost its marbles." 

The American visitor in the film, Holly Martins (played by Joseph Cotton), is a writer of romantic Western B-novels and a believer, as Roger Ebert puts it here, "in the simplified good and evil of his novels." He is a naïve fellow, totally at odds with the war-wizened denizens of the city he visits. Oddly, the film's production paralleled this divide. The American producer, David O. Selznick, most famous for romances like Gone with the Wind, wanted to film The Third Man in studio with a decidedly more upbeat tone than his British director, Carol Reed. Reed prevailed, shooting the film on location in the desolate, bombed out streets of Vienna.