| Ian Taylor |
The Third Man plays at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, May 3, through Tuesday, May 5. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
Two gentlemen are sitting in a railway carriage, traveling through London. As the train slows down at a station, the first man looks out the window and says, “Is this Wembley?”
The second man, gauging, replies, “No, it’s Thursday.”
The first man nods thoughtfully and says, “So am I. Let’s go get a drink.”
WGN-TV’s lineup in 80s Chicago was strong. Bozo brought us in, Soul Train kept us, and inveterate Cubs fans like myself were naturally drawn to the network for their game coverage. In 78 they’d gone national, switched to a 24hr format and, still growing into their new shoes, were now airing more films as filler in the late evening and early morning. Some were older and British (or had heavily British casts), giving me the impression that English accents I heard at home from my Derbyshire father’s side of the family were of a larger, more widespread English culture that everyone was aware of. I heard the accent at home; there it was on my TV. Sorted. The Lavender Hill Mob, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, The Adventures of Robin Hood (my first film obsession thanks to Rains, Rathbone, and Cooper) all felt a natural part of the day. Straight from the Zenith into our home and beyond. I first saw The Third Man around this time some early morning over cereal.
Graham Greene and Carol Reed’s postwar Vienna in The Third Man, about a fellow recently arrived to find his friend deemed deceased and less reputable than he can stomach, is charming, desolate, dry, wry, and dangerous. The war lurks but the film refreshingly never addresses the infamous from the war. It’s local in convention, no matter how much it stresses its internationalism. Everyone’s opportunistic in their own way. Everyone’s non-plussed in their own way. Joseph Cotten’s Holly, our proxy hoping to find in Vienna something of what he knew from the past, explores the casual misunderstandings all our characters trudge through. Valli’s Anna, pragmatic artist and romantic survivor, leads and trails and leads again gracefully. Trevor Howard, Bernard Lee, inevitably Orson Welles. Peak form, every one of them.
The film is so much about confused and confusing, misleading and/or misunderstood people, it’s a wonder the viewer seldom feels lost. Quite the opposite, we’re happy to trundle along like the two fellows in a train carriage, chuckling our way through each scene’s deception (more commonly self-deception). Calloway waiting for Holly to catch up. Anna waiting for Holly to catch up. Holly waiting for Anna to catch up. The black market hoping nobody catches up. Birds, cats, and dogs all betray. Calloway’s Callahan, heaven is down and hell is up, Anna’s disputed citizenship, Welles’ transatlanticism, a dead body appearing in such a cheery opening monologue, a smiling child mimicking a throat-slashing, Holly as a broke and successful writer, Holly as the shill and the mark, Popescu saying seeing Harry die was the first time he’s seen a person die and claiming to be an arbiter of civic duty. And the one thing everyone seems to agree on is that you can pick on a porter.
Reed’s opening narration of Vienna being “bombed about a bit,” a savory bit of Greeneian understatement, can seem misleading at worst and repressed at best to an American audience, to whom anything short of overt feels deeply dishonest. To some English ears it is clear and concise, a bit of gallows humor that acknowledges without wallowing. A bit of “…well, anyway…” It’s contentment to sit in the discomfort of it all, since, if we’re here, we might as well get a laugh out of it. Greene’s depiction of life in rubble, whether under active threat or in clean-up mode, is always present in short stories like The Destructors, and Alas, Poor Maling, and in novels like The End of the Affair. All, like The Third Man, deal with disillusionment or misunderstanding of some kind. They all test our sense of certainty.
And while on the topic of discomfort and/or being misled, I’m obligated (for good reason) to mention the cinematography and zither. Dutch tilts, deep focus, and Henri Cartier-Bresson-like staircase shots are hard to pull off largely because they’re so easy to overdo. Robert Krasker’s camera is disorienting, intimate, articulate, and grand. It woos you only to throw you off your stride. Same with Anton Karas’s music which seems to fit every occasion. It fits the movie so well that it’s the zither’s absence which does so much to heighten the suspense in the sewer chase. Which brings us to Harry.
“A person doesn’t change just because you find out more,” is a hard observation to hear. It can sound like either forgiveness of the heinous or a coldness to contrition. Anna holds to it at admirable cost when she continues to defend Harry after learning the worst of him, though less so when she makes an about-face on Holly. But then she knows Harry better than most. Harry will always tack towards the far side of the social norm. As a schoolboy he’ll cheat a test. As a young man he’ll play a light con game. In a city recovering from war with newly established codes of black market conduct, he’ll stray past graft to casualties and betrayal. Wherever society has drawn the line, that’s where he’ll start. And he appears to enjoy this despite the harm he inflicts.
I’m finishing this bit of writing in room 3941 of the step-down unit in United Hospital, watching my father recover from an episode of hypercapnia brought on by a lung infection of the kind he regularly acquires these days, a knock-on effect of the stomach pull-through he had a few years back, itself a repair of a colonic interposition he had in the early 80s. Antibiotics, blood draws for troponin and magnesium, nebulizers, PT, OT, kind staff, quality of life talks. The kind of things predicated on compassion and supply-chain reliability. All of which is to say Harry Lime’s a bastard. And that Greene, Reed, and Welles made that man, who can medically malign others without a second thought, so damned attractive is absolutely lovely. Charm exists with ugliness here, and this film should be so much more uncomfortable than it is and it’s singular in its ability to be so blithe about things so stark. We still fall for Harry, and I’m fine letting Greene and Reed discreetly pull me in different directions.
I hope to soon hear my father dust off his English accent, like during previous hospital visits when we’d identified some well-humored staff to confuse with Derbyshire “ey up”s mixed with midwestern “hiya”s. The confusion didn’t stop them from saving his life, nor did it hinder his recovery. Everyone kept plugging along, getting where they needed to go. So it is with our characters, even if Holly was “born to be murdered” and Anna lives on survival’s knife’s edge. Except for Paine. He’s buggered.
Trylon volunteer Ian Taylor has put together a crossword puzzle for the Trylon’s May Noir series! The first ten people to complete the puzzle are invited to claim a popcorn token at the Trylon’s box office.
What to do:
1. Download and print the crossword, available below.
2. Bring the completed crossword to the Trylon box office for verification.
3. Hurry up and claim your tokens!
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon