Movie: The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)
It's not as great as Casablanca, but similarly to it, The Third Man is about a man who has to choose between the greater, moral, good and his personal feelings towards an important figure from his past. And like Rick Blaine, Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) is a foreigner stuck in a city that has become a hotbed of international intrigue. Unlike Rick, however, Holly believes that doing the right thing will also get him the girl, failing to realise that 1949 Vienna is way too complex for straightforward expressions of love and loyalty. The city is divided into four sectors, ruled by the Americans, Brtions, Sovjets and French, with its central area designated as an international zone and the ravages from the war still highly visible. Not an ideal state of affairs, and as The Third Man shows, one that was for obvious reasons not much liked by the locals. Yet, the film also paints a vivid picture of Vienna as a place of opportunity and escape for a diverse crowd of intellectuals, diplomats, spies, hustlers and outcasts, turning it into a perversely appealing city where you can forge new identities, make fortunes on the black market, and have the freedom to operate in the shadows, to be disreputable outside the control of traditional and centralised institutions. At least, if the Russians don't get you.
The Third Man may portray a world that has long disappeared (though Vienna is still a city of immigrants and one of the centres of international spycraft), any contemporary freelance (copy)writer will recognise a part of them in poor Holly Martins. Holly is technically an author of mediocre pulp paperback westerns, but low on income, he has been forced to accept his old friend Harry Lime's (Orson Welles) invitation to come to Vienna and write up his new self-funded healthcare startup. Alas, just upon arrival in Austria, Holly finds that his friend has died in a mysterious car accident and decides to investigate the situation. In the process he falls in love with Harry's bereaved lover Anna (Alida Valli), mostly because a beautiful, kind woman talking to him seems to be a rare phenomenon in his life these days. Holly should know better than to pursue her, but the film is partly about how hard it is to reconcile your feelings with the cold hard facts.
It's easy to see why Reed's direction has become quite iconic. Admittedly, he does overuse the Dutch angles a bit; there are a number of scenes where he goes to such great lemgths to get a canted shot, it almost stops the film in its tracks. You always see what he is going for, but there are some cases where a more straightforward shot would have made more sense, both narratively and aesthetically. But it is interesting how succesfully he combines this stylised approach with a more documentarian one that sets you right in the middle of Vienna and provides a great sense of life in the city, of the atmosphere in its restaurants and streets, and of how the strange political situation influences ordinary lives. It is particularly attentive to how all these foreigners work to overcome language barriers, and the frustration of the Austrians to not be able to speak in their own language to the people in charge of their city. Reed's exaggerated noirish expressions help evoke that unease, the feeling that nobody truly knows anyone in the city, that you don't really have a sense of what could happen at any given point, and the ensuing impossibility of making long term, permanent plans, knowing that everything could change in an instant.
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