Review: The Third Man

The film examines a modern post-war environment where people’s lives are treated as nothing more than a means to financial success.

The Third Man
Photo: Rialto Pictures

Of all the iconic images in Carol Reed’s The Third Man, none is as recognizable as the sight of Harry Lime (Orson Welles) standing in a Vienna doorway, bathed in shadow. Accompanied by Anton Karas’s unforgettable zither score, it’s one of the most iconic entrances in film history, which is befitting one of film’s most unforgettable characters. Although he’s only on screen for a fraction of The Third Man’s running time, Lime stands out as one of the screen’s most chilling embodiments of the banality of evil, and a perfect stand-in for the film’s vision of moral breakdown in post-World War II Europe.

When American pulp novelist Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) arrives in Vienna, it’s with the intention of staying with Lime, a longtime friend. Upon his arrival, though, Martins learns of Lime’s death after being struck by a taxi. Martins attends Lime’s funeral and meets Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli), who had been in love with Lime. He also meets Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), who informs Martins of Lime’s black-market dealings (selling diluted quantities of penicillin to the sick, leading to cases of madness and death). While investigating Lime’s death, Martins comes to the conclusion that Lime was murdered by his criminal associates and sets out to find proof of his theory, discovering in the process that Lime wasn’t killed at all.

The scene in which Martins confronts Lime in an amusement park is one of the greatest in cinema history. At one point, Lime launches into a stunning monologue on the necessity of violence in the world, part of which goes: “Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love—they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

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Rumor has it that Welles, rather than screenwriter Graham Greene, was responsible for the monologue, but its architect hardly matters; in the hands of Welles and Reed, who stages it on a Ferris wheel spinning high above the ground, it plays as nothing less than a battle of good versus evil fought while mankind passes oblivious below. “Look down there,” Lime tells Martins. “Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you 20,000 pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?”

That’s the question that motivates Third Man, which, like many of the era’s seminal noirs, examines a modern post-war environment where people’s lives are treated as nothing more than a means to financial success (see also Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, the murder plot of which literally boils a man’s life down to a dollar amount). By utilizing the German-inspired visual techniques of wide shots, canted angles, jagged architecture, and expressionistic chiaroscuro lighting, directors like Reed and Wilder created an environment of spatial and moral confusion in which their pulpy narratives could take on the ethical weight of a bibilical proverb.

As Lime attempts to escape from the police in the sewers of Vienna, he grasps helplessly up through a sewer grate at a light he can’t reach, and the effect is that of the wicked being denied entrance into heaven. And in The Third Man, such an image isn’t even remotely silly. Rather, it’s pure, devastating, and vital, just as much now as it was at the time of its making.

Score: 
 Cast: Joseph Cotton, Alida Valli, Orson Welles, Tervor Howard, Bernard Lee  Director: Carol Reed  Screenwriter: Graham Greene  Distributor: Rialto Pictures  Running Time: 104 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1949  Buy: Video

Matt Noller

Matthew Noller is a senior associate in the Sacramento office of King & Spalding and a member of the firm’s Government Matters practice.

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