In this golden age of home viewing, the Criterion Collection still provides some of the best editions of the best movies ever released, usually with a rich selection of extras and often including audio commentaries (a feature they pioneered, and perhaps the greatest gift ever to film students and cinephiles alike). This column features one Criterion release per week, based on where my interests lead me and what’s available from my local public library.
Carol Reed’s The Third Man is a banquet that offers so much of everything that you will never run out of things to enjoy within it, even as you may have already had too much of some other things it offers. It has achieved the semi-mythical status of films like Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and is more often an object of appreciation than criticism (it regularly tops lists of greatest British films of all time, for instance). The first time I saw The Third Man, I thought it was the very height of cynical cool, and my admiration has only broadened since then. It’s a real old-school movie that offers sophisticated entertainment, armchair travel, and memorable dialogue and is clearly meant for an audience of adults.
The Third Man opens with a closeup of a zither and the sound of Anton Karas’ “The Third Man Theme” as the title credits roll, followed by a world-weary voiceover by director Carol Reed and (real) shots of a Vienna heavily damaged by war and in which corruption was (apparently) the order of the day. It’s an efficient way to introduce audiences to the world of the film and lay out the geography before introducing the key players. Those would be the American pulp fiction writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton), whose silly name is an indication of his naïve character; the beautiful and mysterious Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli), the very British Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), and of course Harry Lime (Orson Welles), who (spoiler alert) is the axis around which everyone else turns yet doesn’t appear until about an hour in.
Martins is in Vienna to meet Lime, who offered him a job, but is told that Lime recently died in a traffic accident. He meets Schmidt at Lime’s funeral, and the two begin to investigate what really happened, finding many discrepancies between different accounts and learning a few unsavory things about Lime, including that he was a opportunistic criminal who stole drugs from military hospitals and sold them in diluted form on the black market. They encounter a lot of other characters as well, including Crabbin (Wilfrid Hyde-White), a somewhat befuddled upper-class Englishman, and locals “Baron” Kurtz (Ernst Deutsch) and Dr. Winkel (Erich Ponto), both of which reek of corruption and decay.
One thing The Third Man is noted for is its use of canted (Dutch) angles—perhaps to excess, or perhaps just the right amount to signify that the film takes place in a world where just about nothing is on the square. This expressionist turn was the exception rather than the rule for cinematographer Robert Krasker, who usually employed a more naturalistic approach. Since Krasker employed a similar expressionist style for Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947), maybe Reed should get the credit for the choice of cinematic style in this picture, with Krasker credited with carrying it out expertly.
The Third Man wouldn’t be the film it is without the score by Anton Karas, a zither performer and composer whose career was made by the success of this film and of the single “The Third Man Theme”, which became a hit in both Britain and the United States. It was a bold move to feature a single instrument so prominently but the gamble paid off, with the zither providing just the right touch of Old World Exotic for a story set in a postwar Vienna. Reportedly Reed discovered Karas playing in a wine bar in Vienna and offered him the job of writing the film’s score, despite the fact that Karas had never composed anything before, at least not in the chicken-scratch meaning of “compose.”
Costume designer Ivy Baker’s work is equally vital to the film: you know immediately who each character is based on what they are wearing. Martins has a beautiful overcoat and suit to match his innocent attitude because he’s an American who didn’t suffer during the war. Anna’s landlady’s (Hedwig Bleibtreu) makeshift costumes signal the opposite: she’s a survivor doing the best she can in a depleted environment. Baron Kurtz’s somewhat antiquated fur collar and bow tie (and bad teeth, which may be the work of makeup artist George Frost) scream “Old World degeneration” while Dr. Winkel’s silk scarves and too-fussy appearance signal a sexual preference that would never have made it past the American censors were it to be spoken directly. | Sarah Boslaugh
Spine #: 64
Technical details: 104 min.; B&W; screen ratio 1.33:1; English.
Edition reviewed: Blu-ray
Extras: audio commentary by Guy Hamilton, Simon Callow, and Angela Allen; alternative voiceover opening by Joseph Cotton (used in the American release at the insistence of David O. Selznick, who felt American audiences wouldn’t relate to the more cynical tone of Reed’s narration); two trailers; radio play by Orson Welles featuring the character Harry Lime; interactive tour of Vienna locations featured in the film (itself worth the price of admission if you’re a fan of armchair travel); a stills gallery; audio interviews with Joseph Cotton and Graham Green; and an interview and zither performance by Cornelia Mayer.
Fun Fact: There are hints of “deviant” sexuality throughout The Third Man, and a scene was cut from the screenplay that involves two men sharing a bed which totally set David O. Selznick off. I think there’s a hint of more than friendship between Kurz and Winkel as well, but YMMV.
Parting Thought: The ending of the film is not the ending of Graham Greene’s novella, mainly because director Carol Reed felt Greene’s conclusion was artificial. Somewhat surprisingly, the director won out over the money men (the American distributor, led by David O. Selznick, wanted something more Hollywood). Did Reed make the right choice in valuing his vision for the film over its original source material?
