100 Movies Every Catholic Should See #25: The Third Man (1949)

Directed by Carol Reed. Written by Graham Greene. Starring Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard.

*major spoilers ahead*

Imagine being a foreigner walking the dark streets of a bombed-out city, eerily devoid of people except for you and the man you suspect is following you. A deep sense of unease permeates the air as you ponder your friend’s mysterious death and wonder if your invisible companion comes from the police or from the people you suspect killed him.

Such is the feeling which Carol Reed thrusts you into in The Third Man, one of the best cinematic thrillers of all time. Through masterful use of setting, lighting, and cinematography, as well as a stellar script from Graham Greene, Reed immerses us in the twists and turns of a thrilling mystery, one which exposes the greed and evil of wartime profiteers and tests the limits of friendship, loyalty, and love.

The Third Man follows Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), an struggling American author of popular Westerns who has been invited to Vienna after World War II by his friend, Harry Lime, who has promised him a job writing for a medical charity in the war-torn city. He arrives just in time for Lime’s funeral, saddened to discover that an automobile accident has killed his friend and patron. He decides to stay in Vienna, smitten by the sight of Lime’s former lover (Alida Valli) at the funeral, and as he meets Lime’s friends and associates begins to suspect that not everything about his death is as it seems. Different witnesses have different accounts of how quickly he died and how many men helped carry his body away from the scene. Harry’s friends insist there were only two men, but a hotel porter who watched from a window saw a third man. Martins’ dogged search for this third man brings him into conflict with the international police governing post-WWII Vienna as well as the criminals and racketeers he discovers were Harry Lime’s boon companions.

The setting of late 1940s Vienna is one of the film’s greatest assets. Reed was able to film much of the outdoor scenes on location in Vienna, giving us a glimpse of the devastation wrought on this once lovely city. There is rubble everywhere, piles of trash and discarded military equipment line its once graceful streets, and the people are sullen and downtrodden by years of war, black market extortion, and foreign governance. The memory of gay Vienna, waltzing to Strauss and entertaining dukes and emperors, is invoked several times to contrast silence and ruin brought on by war. Reed further evokes a sense that nothing is as it should be by liberal use of Dutch angles, tilting the camera to an unsettling degree and filling the viewer with unease and sadness.

Unease and sadness also plague Holly Martins as he searches further and further for the truth about Harry Lime’s death. The police are at first abrupt and obstructive, doing everything but outright ordering Martins to go home. Harry’s friends seem obsequious and willing to help, but their story quickly deteriorates as they can’t seem to keep it consistent. As the film goes on, Martins gets a new picture of his old friend: a racketeer diluting life-saving penicillin and extorting desperate parents, leading ultimately to the death and disfigurement of hundreds of Austrian children. As Martins reflects on his memories of Lime, he reveals to us that Lime had always been a bit of a cad, cheating at cards and always looking out for his own self-interest. Still, his loyalty to his friend drives him forward on his search for truth, gravitating more and more to the police than the criminals and putting himself and those around him in danger in the process.

*Final Spoiler Warning!*

This brings us to the sequence I described at the beginning of this post. Martins is walking through the dark, empty streets of Vienna, suspecting that someone is keeping an eye on him and sensing danger in every doorway. The lighting and shadows evoke Renaissance chiaroscuro as Martins walks and the Dutch angles heighten the tension. Everything is somehow crooked and drowned in darkness; Martins is struggling to find the truth of this matter. He sees a man hiding in a doorway, face obscured in shadow, and calls out confrontationally to him, waking a neighbor who throws a sudden beam of light on the whole situation.

The light reveals Harry Lime, in the flesh (and played with devilish charm by Orson Welles), shocking both audience and Martins (although savvy viewers will have picked up on the man’s identity thanks to a brilliant earlier throwaway line about a cat). In the following scenes, the little clues we have been given about Lime’s character are thrown into sharp relief. He is immature, given to cruel jokes and casual thoughtlessness; he’s out for a quick buck, no matter who and how many he hurts in the process; although he inspires loyalty in his friends, he has no compunction about breaking the bonds of friendship, casting aside his lover Anna Schmidt without a second thought and ready to throw Holly Martins off a Ferris wheel if it turned out he was the only person who knew Lime was alive. Harry Lime is the face of the banality of evil, a man with an easy-going, charismatic nature who it turns out has no deeper allegiance and no greater love than himself. He relishes the power of life and death that he holds and sets a price (and a rather low price, at that) on the value of human life. Martins is shocked to see the reality behind this man he once loved, and he works with the police to bring an end to his reign of terror in Vienna.

However, this betrayal, albeit just, really eats at Holly Martins. This is personified by Anna Schmidt, whom Martins had fallen in love with. She is still unquestionably loyal to Harry Lime, refusing to escape Vienna and possible Soviet deportation in return for Lime’s capture. She attempts to warn Lime when he eventually does walk into the trap and he is almost able to escape. The final shot of the film is of Martins waiting for Schmidt as she walks slowly past him, unable to forgive him for this act of betrayal. This exploration of loyalty becomes even more interesting when we take into account Graham Greene’s personal life at the time: when writing The Third Man, he was contemplating ending his marriage and leaving his family, a step he would ultimately take but which seems to have haunted him for the rest of his life. Anna, the loyal one, seems to leave the picture with her dignity intact, whereas Holly, who betrayed his friend, is left alone and heartbroken. Greene and Reed explore these themes of conflicting duties and loyalties, one to one’s friends and one to society at large. Harry Lime’s charisma is such that even though we know him for the monster he is, even we the audience are seduced by his easygoing charm and hold out some small hope for his escape.

Ultimately, however, Lime is chased into the sewers of Vienna in one of the most thrilling climaxes of old Hollywood. He is one man trying to escape the police and his old friend Holly. After finding most of his escape routes cut off (as seen in some indescribably gorgeous black-and-white cinematography), Lime is trapped and tries to get past Martins, who is forced to shoot his old friend like one of the cowboys in his novels. Thus is the end of Harry Lime: the charismatic racketeer who poisoned the sick children of Vienna is trapped like a rat in a sewer.

The Third Man is one of the greatest thrillers of the mid-twentieth century. Its exploration of themes of loyalty, deception, and everyday evil and perfectly complemented by its gothic setting, gorgeous lighting and cinematography, and excellent dialogue and acting. It is a truly excellent film and deserves its place alongside Alfred Hitchcock’s best in the pantheon of great thrilling cinema.