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. 

Sweden and the Welfare State

One of the trends over the course of European history has been the expansion of the notion of "rights." The liberal tradition first introduced the idea of civil rights, like property and liberty, through the work of people like John Locke. The notion of political rights followed--suffrage in particular in the 19th century. The 20th century marked the dawn of "social rights." Both the right and the left embrace this idea that society is obligated to provide certain "positive goods" to their citizens, whether they be the heroic glory of servitude in fascism or the cradle-to-grave care of the welfare state. 

This article outlines the problem with this trend. Ask yourself--are you entitled to a certain standard of living? And does the emphasis on the provision of "positive goods" by some to others diminish or increase the amount of "positive goods" in society? I think not. This trend marks the increasing "socialization" of Europe over the centuries, and with it, the decline of the self-initiating, responsible individual. Troubling.

One Take on the End of Communism

One of my favorite foreign films is Goodbye, Lenin!, the story of a son and daughter's attempts to protect their mother from realizing that Germany has been reunified. Their mother falls into a coma shortly before the fall of the Berlin wall and wakes from it afterwards, leading to an elaborate scheme. In this scene, however, their mother realizes something is amiss when she accidentally wanders out into the streets of the newly unified, capitalistic Germany. 

What I think the excerpt illustrates is how people under totalitarian societies internalize their own oppression. They come to expect so little of their government that they find themselves totally and completely disoriented by the glut of possibility represented by reunification here (or perhaps, the pink shag lampshade). The image of the statue of Lenin being carried away by the helicopter, moreover, hints to the romanticization of communism in the wake of its passing, as in the song we listened to in class.