‘Best friend I ever had…’
‘That sounds like a cheap novelette’.
Pause.
‘I write cheap novelettes’.
And, thus, in the space of three spare lines, Sir Carol Reed’s The Third Man, written by storyteller extraordinaire Graham Greene, demonstrates just how false, ludicrous or even flimsy our friendships and allegiances can be. The morally complex construct in which the film operates, one that the author’s admirers call ‘Greeneland’, is an eerily prescient landscape of the real world that is teeming with little, seemingly casual but acutely unsettling betrayals at every corner: the slobbering, desperate disciple who turns into a pathetic Judas in The Power Of The Glory, the willing, wanton lover of The End Of The Affair who transforms into a saint to a cause that is hard to believe in the earnest, misguided do-gooder who steals a cynic’s only love with his innocence in The Quiet American and the enigmatic and eventually elusive surrogate father of The Captain And The Enemy.
In The Third Man, as in these works, moral duplicity and treachery are to be found, according to Reed and Greene, in the most innocuous of all relationships – that of camaraderie that begins at tender, unassuming boyhood and paves the way for a friendship that becomes a malicious, selfish game in adulthood. Malice is one of the writer’s pivotal themes, malice in carefully calibrated degrees yet casual and even reckless in nature and consequence and it also gives Reed the opportunity to flesh the deeply bitter irony of the narrative with his own wry, witty storytelling vigour.
‘Already in hell…or in heaven’, announces the earnest and diffident Austrian porter in the beginning of the film, as Holly Martins, a wet-behind-the-ears pulp hack from faraway America, is told on his arrival in war-torn Vienna that his best friend Harry Lime was killed in an accident just a few hours ago. Right from that disorienting moment and the subsequent scene in which Martins is suitably perturbed at the strange faces standing around Lime’s coffin being lowered into a snowy grave, the director and writer plunge us into a cinematic territory that feels darker and more markedly cynical than the usual American noir thriller.
The cold, blasted and battered Vienna, divided into four zones for each of the Allied powers and yet, one that ‘doesn’t really look any worse than a lot of other European cities’ is a far cry from the sunlit, palm-lined vistas of California or the American wasteland of motels and garages with which we usually equate the genre of modern noir; nor does it have icy blondes with dubious, even promiscuous intentions or hard-boiled detectives fashioned after Bogart. Yes, it does have an arching, monologue-spouting kingpin but he too is etched out in Greene’s trademark strokes of boyish bravado and a misplaced, perverse sense of incorruptible belief, as in Pinky from Brighton Rock or the eponymous bon vivant of Doctor Fischer Of Geneva, who devises ‘grand’ parties designed to humiliate his guests out of a mysterious quest for some elusive truth.
And so, we follow Martins in this cold and alienating post-war landscape of vice and illegal trade, the film siding inevitably with a hopelessly out-of-sorts protagonist who is again hardly the sharp or particularly shrewd cynical protagonist who teases out the truth with their brains or fists. With a Southern accent slurred at the edges with drink or a lazy predicament, Martins feels like one of Greene’s archetype American characters, not wholly trustworthy or even heroic and distinguished from their greyer and more rascally English or European counterparts with their sense of adventurous idealism that leads them to inevitable doom.
In the original story, later published as a novella, Martins was envisioned by Greene as Rollo Martins, English hack writer who wrote Westerns under an American pseudonym and the result was a more taciturn character who has shed his naiveté and knows his way around the moral complexity of his world better than his on-screen version. In the film, much of the dark hilarity derives from how Martins finds himself hurled from one shenanigan to another, on a wild goose hunt for a truth driven by righteous anger at his best friend being called a ‘murderer’ by the police.
It is not only his bumbling, stumbling, purely incidental foolhardiness that earns our laughs; it is also Greene and Reed’s ear for wry humour that makes so much of the film disarmingly hilarious, even absurdly comical. Think, for instance, Lime’s shady friends and their terse encounters with Martins: Kurtz’s clumsy lies, Popescu’s showboating Continental swagger, Winkel’s cold Teutonic indifference. Or think of poor Mr. Crabbin, arranging Allied propaganda events which include both Hamlet and Hindu striptease dancers and mistaking Martins for a serious author, leading to one of the most uproarious scenes in cinematic history.
For all the lark, it is the grimmer, grimier side of Greene’s story and Reed’s film that haunts even today. The film is an insidiously harrowing portrait of the moral venality and helpless, even desperate disorientation that one could experience all too clearly in the aftermath of the Second World War. Cities like Vienna and Berlin were indeed left vulnerable to the swarm of many a profiteer running an amoral conspiracy; even the Allies were as much at the helm of these illegitimate dealings as the Nazis who escaped to havens in South America and Egypt. One of Greene’s numerous gifts as a powerfully prophetic, astute storyteller has been his incisive, relentlessly probing dissection of the many political upheavals on the world map through both his essays and novels.
From the Mexican wasteland of the 1930s, policed thuggishly by the Red Shirts and where faith itself was a crime worth capital punishment to the sweetly poisoned exotic colour of Cuba at the end of Batista’s hard-fisted regime, from the debilitating end of the French colonial rule in Indo-China, paving the way for the travesty known as the Vietnam War to the dark, dank dystopia of Haiti under Papa Doc Duvalier, hellholes and failed democracies have intrigued both Greene’s Machiavellian imagination and his deepest, most heartfelt sympathies. Vienna, in contrast, feels benign in its desolate, dilapidated state; there are still jolly plays being staged at the Josefstadt Theatre but there is no denying the evil that lies at the heart of darkness of its black market trade, as evidenced by just how many casually callous medical practitioners came under the scanner after the film was released.
All this comes brilliantly, ferociously to life with Reed’s brilliant, almost compulsive demonstration of technique, aided by his superb cast and crew. Shooting, for most part, on location and shooting most of the film in night, with cinematographer Robert Krasker devilishly blending seminal Dutch angles and a masterful play of chiaroscuro, the director not only succeeds in creating an unrelenting atmosphere of paranoia but also adds unmistakable touches of pathos to even the littlest of the scenes, lingering on a wizened landlady muttering angrily and desperately when the Allied military police ravage her house and leave it all a tumble or in the tears that stream down the face of the sad-eyed beauty Anna, bringing a melancholic Expressionist flavour to the noir plotting.
His audacious decision, of choosing the literally unknown zither player Anton Karas to compose the entire score with his single trademark instrument, pays off in spades, resulting not only in one of the most mesmerising themes ever composed but also suggesting that the ravages of war had still not quite obliterated Austria’s hidden gift of melody.
The cast is flawlessly chosen. Valli, looking both deceptively demure and elegantly tough willed, is more than just a femme fatale; she is a real, believable woman, etched out in Greene’s peerless character building strokes as full of intriguing contradictions, heartbroken with torment and yet also willing to play along with the harsh truths of her life. The charismatic Trevor Howard plays the crusty, coolly sarcastic Major Calloway with wry, silken ease while Joseph Cotten makes for a very compellingly feckless and flustered Martins, portraying his character’s boyish predicament more credibly than what Reed’s original choice James Stewart would have done with the same character.
Much scene-stealing is done by an American legend whose name I would hate to reveal to the uninitiated and who ad-libs a famous monologue about how evil breeds pure genius. And special mention should go rightfully to the fascinating Austrian veterans picked to play some very crucial roles, like Paul Horbiger as the befuddled but somewhat amiable porter. And watch out for Bernard Lee, who would later be cast as M in the early James Bond films, as the polite but quick-fisted Sergeant Paine.
So much of what went into bringing the film to screen is the stuff of legend: Reed and Greene’s resolute and steely creative defiance against the sensationalist tendencies of Hollywood producer David O’ Selznick, Reed and Greene’s debate about the climax (the latter insisting on a happier alternate end hinting at a possible romance), Greene’s guerrilla style reportage of the black market rackets and his journalistic portrait of the city’s frozen cemeteries, hotels, drinking places and even the sewers and Reed’s painstaking command of directing all the three production units himself.
What makes The Third Man, seventy years after it first released, still flawless and effective as both a startling thriller and a richly sardonic morality play acclaimed and deserving of the same accolade as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Orson Welles’ Touch Of Evil or even The Fallen Idol (also directed by Reed and written by Greene)? The answer is to be found in the film’s deceptive mathematical simplicity, when compared to the more elaborate tangle of lies and conspiracies to be found in its American counterparts like The Maltese Falcon or for that matter in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown.
The film has, on the surface, a largely basic and low-key premise, of a curious, nonplussed protagonist trying to find out the truth behind his friend’s most mysterious and all-too-convenient death, only to uncover a bigger game afoot but such is Reed and Greene’s immaculate attention to the smallest and most devilish of details, from character quirks to mistaken intentions, from the strangeness of an alien tongue to even our capacity for deliberate omission of the truth, that the film remains constantly exciting, enthralling and brilliantly powerful and affecting even today.
