The Favorites - The Third Man (#15)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. The Third Man (1949/UK/dir. Carol Reed) appeared at #15 on my original list.

What it is • "I never knew the Vienna before the war," a cheerful narrator informs us, shortly before disappearing from the film altogether. It's that kind of movie. The music - starting even before this fast-paced opening montage, with the image of a zither playing under the credits - is defiantly incongrous with the shadowy streets onscreen and the murky intrigues of the story (quite a bit more on that in a moment). Our hero, Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) isn't much of a hero at all, an American abroad in a land whose pernicious complications he doesn't understand; the film itself seems to hold him in contempt even as it accepts him as our guide. The flashy title character, Harry Lime, is dead when the film begins and Orson Welles' much-celebrated role in the movie is little more than a cameo in terms of screentime (though boy do those handful of minutes pack a punch). The Third Man is very British in sensibility and attitude, as crisp and curt as Reed and writer Graham Greene could manage, but the two most important characters are American, and this may be the greatest noir, a very American form. Francois Truffaut once grumbled that British cinema was a contradiction in terms but The Third Man is as visually rich as any Hollywood feature with several of the most striking images in cinema history. My favorite is the final shot, as a figure approaches from the horizon, flanked by two symmetrical rows of trees, while leaves flitter down from the sky at random. Moving on a narrative level, striking as pure pictorialism, this single take also evokes the flavor of the entire movie, mixing meticulous order (the trees) with spontaneous energy (the leaves), leavening its air of inevitable fate (the long walk) with bracing dashes of ironic surprise (the unbroken stride, straight past the camera, leaving Holly to smoke his cigarette in bittersweet resignation).

Why I like it •

The Third Man

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

"If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend," E.M. Forster once wrote, "I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." Albert Camus, faced with the possibility of his mother being killed by terrorists in the struggle for Algerian independence, said, "If that is justice, I prefer my mother." The circumstances in The Third Man - British officer Callaway tries to get naive American author Holly Martins to sell out his criminal friend Harry Lime, for the sake of Anna, a Czechoslovakian refugee - seem far more lopsided in duty's direction. Humanitarianism, rather than questionable nationalism, is set up against friendly loyalty, while the victim of justice is not a mother blown up on a tram, but a sociopathic greedy child-poisoner. Yet in a way, this only deepens the dilemma: the characters have every reason to betray Harry Lime, but one of them almost doesn't and the other never would.

Noir and Naturalism 1946 - 1949 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 8

The eighth chapter in "32 Days of Movies", an audiovisual tour through 366 films.

(2015 update: included Vimeo embed after the jump)


View "Chapter 8: Noir and Naturalism"

Noir and Naturalism

Waking up in the postwar world, it was as if all the jitters and anxiety that had been submerged for the war effort were now out in the open. Already, a new style/genre/sensibility/movement had been developing (though it was too unconscious and informal to fit some of those terms). Later dubbed "film noir," this perspective scanned the hardened landscape with jaundiced eyes, yet with an undercurrent of wounded romanticism that made this dark world something you wanted to plunge into again and again. Meanwhile, both overseas and in Hollywood, an "opening" was occurring in the classically enclosed studio style.