The Third Man
...slightly ajar
by Bruce Cantwell
Have you ever seen Bambi Meets Godzilla? Short movie. Godzilla steps on Bambi. The End.
That's how Graham Greene's tale of shell-shocked postwar Vienna begins. American pulp western author Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) arrives in Austria to work for his old stateside buddy Harry Lime: but Harry's dead. The story is no sooner set in motion than quashed.
That's the best thing about The Third Man. It keeps you off balance.
I always thought of Vienna as the city of the Strausses, of Sigmund Freud, elegant ball rooms, palaces, and high European culture, not a gritty, bombed-out rubble-strewn Twilight Zone. If there's one musical instrument I would never associate with Vienna, it's the zither. And what's with all of these tilted camera angles? If it weren't for the stark black & white and desicatedly droll dialogue, I'd think I was watching a Batman episode.
When it appears that Martins has nothing left to do but return home, he serendipitously gets a lift from military police Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), who asks him a few questions. It doesn't take long for Martins to see that Calloway thinks his old buddy was a criminal!
How could Calloway say that about old Harry? Witty, affable, fun-loving Harry Lime...a criminal?
Partly because Calloway suggests Martins should leave Vienna as quickly as possible and partly because he spotted a beautiful, mysterious woman (Allida Valli) at the cemetery, Martins decides to poke around a bit and satisfy his curiosity about the dear departed.
Martins's low-key mysterious journey engrosses as stories of witnesses, friends, associates begin to conflict in ways unattributable to faulty memory.
Ah, so we're in for a mystery, right? A puzzler. But not long after the inconsistencies begin to create a pattern, we are sprung headlong from our cerebral, tightly-woven web to begin a chase through the Vienna sewer system that is far more imaginatively choreographed and pulse-pounding than anything in Indiana Jones!
But wait--that's not the best part. After the film's climax and denouement, there's a closing shot that goes on and on and on and on... |
