Beloved by cinephiles today, Carol Reed’s Vienna-set The Third Man was also a sensation when it was released in 1949, popularizing zither music and inspiring a spinoff radio show starring Orson Welles as the droll but jaded black market dealer Harry Lime. The Man Between, Reed’s subsequent urban noir, was clearly intended to rebottle some of his earlier film’s magic. Set in rubble-strewn Berlin—and featuring, like The Third Man, an abundance of location photography, unique in a studio film of the era—The Man Between likewise addresses the conflicted postwar European character through a morally ambivalent but seductive male protagonist.
Ivo Kern (James Mason), like Harry Lime, has found dubious occupation in a Reich city. A former lawyer and, as a soldier in the Germany Army, a participant in war crimes, he now conducts kidnapping operations on behalf of the East German authorities, clandestinely bringing refugees or wanted men back to the Russian-occupied territory. Still, it’s not immediately apparent—though it probably was to 1950s viewers who saw Mason’s name on the marquee—that Ivo is The Man Between’s main character. As he did with Harry Lime, Reed delays the introduction of his film’s titular character, using the arrival of an outsider to first introduce us to the milieu of early-’50s Berlin, and then to gradually construe the enigmatic Ivo as the subject of intrigue.
In the first quarter of The Man Between, Reed anchors the audience’s perspective in Susanne (Claire Bloom), a young English woman who’s come to Berlin to visit her brother, Martin (Geoffrey Toone), a military doctor who’s stationed in the city. She’s greeted at the airport by Martin’s wife, Bettina (Hildegard Knef), an archetypically tall, blond German woman who Susanne immediately suspects is hiding something. Quite the clever voyeur, as it happens, Susanne peeks unobserved around corners, from behind doors, and via angled mirrors to try to catch glimpses of the mysterious figure that the visibly distressed Bettina is in contact with. This will turn out to be Ivo, who’s in the process of extorting Bettina, scandalously revealed to be his ex-wife, for information on West German spies.
Until Ivo takes over the narrative reins and Susanne is settled into her ultimate position as love interest, it almost seems as though the film should be called The Woman Between. After all, Martin is a nonentity, and the drama of the early scenes plays out entirely between Susanne and Bettina. Reed’s handling of Susanne’s growing suspicion that Bettina is having an affair doesn’t add much to the character’s rather anemic characterization, but it does result in some brilliantly constructed scenes, as Reed uses Susanne’s oblique gazing at obscure events to suggest Berlin’s subterranean world of espionage and partially submerged pasts. Unconventional framing estranges the resplendent nightlife of the West, and an almost painterly use of film noir’s conventional low-key lighting lends a gothic, paranoiac quality to Bettina’s inherited haute bourgeois home on the edge of Berlin’s demolished no man’s land.
After Susanne comes in contact with Ivo, however, the narrative shifts focus. Ivo, at first appearing to have all the detached self-confidence connoted by Mason’s posh diction, turns out to be conflicted, haunted by his dark past and persecuted by his superiors in the East German secret police. He is, in other words, much more a character than Susanne gets to be, and The Man Between soon abandons Bettina almost entirely to focus on Susanne’s growing, selfless admiration for him. Perhaps inevitably, given the film’s era and context of production, Susanne’s character becomes the innocent damsel—representing, both metaphorically and mechanically, Ivo’s hope for asylum in the West. When she’s mistakenly taken prisoner by an East German secret police force headed by the dastardly Halendar (Aribert Wäscher), Ivo sees his opportunity to free her, and in doing so gain the favor of Western authorities.
If The Man Between pales in comparison to The Third Man, the problem is Harry Kurnitz’s screenplay, which tends toward the conventional. Despite strong performances from Mason, Bloom, and Neff, many of the characters here exude a bland, studio-manufactured quality. The exploration of the female characters ends about a third of the way through the film, while most of the supporting characters lack distinguishing color (Berlinerisch or otherwise). And despite Mason’s dashing charm, Ivo is never as seductive an antihero as the deviously mirthful Harry Lime from The Third Man. Also unlike that earlier film, there’s little that feels daring about The Man Between’s story, which, rather than confronting the darkness at the heart of postwar Europe, proves much more comfortable with the emergent Cold War global order.
Despite the evident similarities between The Third Man and The Man Between, their differences paint Vienna and Berlin as distinct places—and 1949 and 1953 as distinct moments in history. While the purportedly easygoing Vienna of The Third Man turns out to be suffused with an inescapable fatalism, the famously hardnosed Berlin of The Man Between represents the very possibility of flight from the cynicism and regret of postwar Europe, identified with the dilapidated and unfree East, into its democratic, morally rehabilitated future. Reed’s mise-en-scène conveys Berlin’s strange, often dangerous liminal quality, its status as an often dangerous interface between two worlds, but the director’s acute sense of atmosphere isn’t particularly well served by his Kurnitz’s script. The Man Between isn’t without anything to say about the order of things circa 1953, but it lacks the memorable characters and world-weary tone that have made The Third Man an indelible part of the film canon.
Image/Sound
The 1080p disc handles Desmond Dickinson’s high-contrast cinematography impeccably, presenting a perfectly balanced black-and-white image that preserves the atmospheric effects of the film’s heightened, nighttime suspense sequences—as well as the grittier, documentary feel of its daytime images of divided Berlin. Subtle film grain is preserved in the image, and the transfer is clearly based on a print that was either exceptionally well preserved or expertly restored, given that there are almost no pockmarks or other flaws on display. The mono soundtrack is likewise flawlessly reproduced on the disc’s DTS stereo track.
Extras
This release lacks any accompanying booklet but includes an impressive set of extras on the disc itself. A well-researched audio commentary by critic Simon Abrams draws upon the biographies of the stars and filmmakers, as well as contemporary critical reactions of The Man Between, to offer background on the film. Abrams adds his own critical interpretation of what he feels is a too-often neglected work, pointing toward Carol Reed’s artful scene construction and the themes of waiting and stasis that distinguish the film from The Third Man.
Also available on the disc is an interview with star Claire Bloom, who expresses little admiration for The Man Between, reiterating multiple times that it was chosen for her by producer Alexander Korda and that it isn’t a film that she would have chosen herself. She does, though, speak admiringly of Reed and co-star James Mason. As a production, the interview is rather slapdash: At one point, Bloom recounts working with Charlie Chaplin on his late-period film Limelight and the picture spliced into the video is, amusingly, a black-and-white still of Robert Downey Jr. as a young Chaplin in Richard Attenborough’s Chaplin.
Much more polished is Carol Reed: A Gentle Eye, a 45-minute documentary on the career of the filmmaker, featuring surviving collaborators discussing his versatility and his impact on British cinema. One intriguing insight offered here is the influence of the British documentary movement of the ’30s and ’40s on Reed’s filmmaking, which suggests The Third Man and The Man Between in a fascinating national lineage, leading up to the kitchen-sink cinema of the ’60s. A conversation with Mason—every bit as disarming as Bloom—also appears among the disc’s extras, in the form of audio of a lecture and interview conducted at a career retrospective at the BFI in 1967. Finally, this release includes trailers for other noirs in Kino Lorber’s library.
Overall
Although not quite an overlooked masterpiece, Carol Reed’s The Man Between is a stylish and visually intelligent thriller from a master of atmospheric cinema, and it’s been preserved beautifully—and with a healthy set of bonus features—on Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray release.
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