Feeling noirish

Last week TCM ran The Third Man—I missed the first ten minutes or so, but when I remembered it was on and switched channels, I fell right into the spell as thoroughly as I did the first time I saw it. (That was at an art theatre in West LA, many, many years ago.)

Actually, it knocked me out. I had the TV on while unpacking boxes from the latest move and I ended up bagging the life-organizing and watching—really paying attention to—the film.

I’m not sure it was the plot so much as the characters and the actual cinematic techniques. I’m not a fan of Joseph Cotton; he’s okay. But Trevor Howard as Major Calloway, the chief of the British MP contingent, is understated commanding presence. I love watching him at work.

Plus, there’s the youthful Orson Welles as the elusive, multi-dimensional Harry Lime. The aftermath of all that destruction is a Petrie dish environment for the Lime bacillus, and he thrives as though he’d been cultivated at great expense. He’s not on camera for most of the film, but he—Lime/Welles—dominates the film.

However it was odd watching him run in one scene—you think, “That can’t be Welles haring off like that, not with his heft.” Then you remember this was 30+ years before those no-wine-before-its-time Paul Masson commercials.

I had to keep reminding myself that Welles didn’t direct the film—actual director Carol Reed used so many of the techniques Welles pioneered in Citizen Kane. Those weird camera angles that make you look at things in ways you’d never have thought of doing yourself. And Reed really made stellar use of the black-&-white medium.

The film is incredibly atmospheric—which is a quality I’m not sure you can get outside of B&W. (Well, maybe Chinatown…) Most of it is shot at night; what light there is, is harsh and unforgiving. You really get the sense of the swirling hell post-war Vienna was. Not a shred of that Austrian Gemütlichkeit in evidence. All that ruined Baroque splendour—and it’s not just the Habsburg buildings.

The place reeks of corruption, as happens in defeated territories. (I wonder if anyone will make a Third Man in Bagdad? Or, God willing, some day in Belgrade?) The city is divided into zones run by the four allied powers; the Soviets are angling at every opportunity to push their control, as they’ve done with all of Eastern Europe. Calloway is doing his best to police his patch while avoiding international incidents.

And that’s one of the problems of victory—it’s one thing to fight and win a war. It’s another entirely to occupy the conquered territory. As armies dating back to Alexander have learned. Vienna, with its long history of decline and its pretentious shabbiness is the perfect setting for the story of black marketeering, unashamed opportunism, scrabbling for survival and  yes, even love.

Of course, it’s love for the wrong person. Another universal theme not restricted to post-war settings.

Then there’s that iconic scene on the Prater, where the resurrected Lime explains his philosophy of personal success to his naïve friend Holly Martins. He utters a line that condenses the whole ethos of 1946 Vienna: “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.”

I have to say that zither music gets up my nose. It’s the 1949 equivalent of a John Williams score (the composer who thinks movies are produced solely to provide a vehicle for his turgid compositions). Like a Williams score, it screams plot points at you in case you can’t follow the subtlety of the film.

Even so—if you’ve not seen it, hie thee to Netflix and get it. If you have seen it—it’s high time you saw it again.