| Chris Polley |
The Man Between plays at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, May 17th, through Tuesday, May 19th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
Borders are fake, but people are real. Director Carol Reed knew this better than most others who have trafficked in spy thrillers and political noir over the years. And while The Man Between is typically less regarded than his prior masterpieces The Third Man, Odd Man Out, and The Fallen Idol (all three of which he made back-to-back-to-back the decade prior), it stands out amid such a rich filmography precisely because it has the benefit of a few extra years of reflection on the mass tragedies of the recent past. Absurdism had begun to eclipse skepticism at this point, and anyone who paid attention to the glorified publicity parade that was the Nuremberg Trials, not to mention the pronounced absence of any kind of trial for the atrocity that was the internment of Japanese-Americans, can attest to the messy business of recovery and reparation following World War II. Reed sees this farce and leans into the ragged flimsiness of Harry Kurnitz’s script to sculpt an ironically taut story about how the only true consequences of corruption are heartbreak and death.
Following doe-eyed Susanne (a nascent Claire Bloom) as she visits her military medic brother Martin (matinee idol Geoffrey Toone) in West Berlin, the first half of The Man Between is all table-setting and mood-building. Susanne becomes acquainted and quickly enamored with both her new sister-in-law Bettina (a stunning Hildegard Knef) and East Berlin interloper Ivo (James Mason, as intriguingly beguiling as ever), whom Bettina refers to as a friend but acts visibly uncomfortable around. What’s arguably even bolder than the deft characterization, however, is the bifurcated world-building of Germany’s two halves as Ivo skips back and forth with Susanne, painting their flirtatious frolicking as literal as the phrase “the guy from the wrong side of the tracks” can possibly be. Pat Brown writes for Slant that “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.” Is it a bit on the nose? Sure, but it’s also effective at setting up the film’s much more exciting and knotty second half.
Later films like Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible or the most existential bits of Martin Ritt’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold recall the work of cinematographer Desmond Dickerson here, making like a more in-your-face Robert Krasker (who famously lensed Third Man and Odd Man Out) and litters the film with Dutch angles and expressionist lighting as the twists and double-crosses unfold relentlessly and recklessly. One particular motif that pays off immensely involves a young bicyclist named Horst (Dieter Krause) who hovers in the corners of several frames. While not a direct adaptation of the great sardonic novelist Graham Greene, Reed “consulted Greene and clearly borrowed the idea of the boy betraying his father figure from ‘The Basement Room’ (the short story source for The Fallen Idol) and [a kidnapping plot] from the original treatment of The Third Man that formed the basis of the 1950 novella,” muses Michael Grace for Cruising the Past. So, while comparison may be the thief of joy in this case, I’d contend it grants the viewer a great blessing of continuing to play in the sandbox of a better film, which is raison d’être enough, but it also allows for a vital and prescient recontextualization of The Third Man’s more stringent take on betrayal and corruption.
While Reed’s messaging may be clearer and bleaker in his works from the 1940s, The Man Between makes a strong argument for humanizing the monster, even if still cutting it out like a tumor. Yes, Susanne becomes entranced and manipulated multiple times over, but it’s rarely unreasonable or unbelievable. The manner in which tension and romance build in unison is engrossing to the viewer too, especially one who views a divided city as a vivid demarcation between good and evil, between a future that forgets the past and a past that refuses to acknowledge the future. As critic Nick Zegarac observes, “Reed nails down a queer sort of mounting dread and paranoia, juxtaposing the rank outsider’s complacency with the built-in pessimism of a defeated Germany, still harboring its freshly buried reprehensible yesterday, while teetering on the brink of an even more brooding and indeterminate tomorrow.” The insidiousness is in the confusion between the two, but the confusion feels more human, more real, and more immediate. If everyone made different gradations of mistakes before, during, and after the war, why are some treated as pariahs and others as heroes? Is there no path forward for a rebuilding that acknowledges and holds accountable but ultimately forgives? Operation Paperclip, anyone?
This is an impossible question to ask, of course, and Reed knows it, but it’s still an artist’s question to utter that which the majority are too afraid to consider. It also adds a delightful amount of suspense to the proceedings, as this is, after all, a thriller. “This [tension] is achieved in the context of the time and location but also in the characterization and subterfuge, where lovers and enemies simultaneously work together and against each other, sometimes without an awareness about the other’s true intentions, emotions or plans,” suggests Anna Mitchell for Kamera Film Salon. It’s shaggy and slipshod, for certain, but it’s also an honest look at the lengths humans will go to justify their attractions and allegiances in the name of morality or nationality. For those of us who barely remember (or perhaps were not even born when) the Berlin Wall fell, it also serves as a potent lesson for the present: walls only exist because people put them there, and they can come down the same way they were erected—one brick at a time.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon