Kris and Adam Discuss AFI’s Top 100: The Third Man

Adam Daroff is an old friend of mine who currently works and lives in LA as an editor of film and TV. We are both finishing off the American Film Institute's Top 100 and writing joint reviews and thoughts as we go. You can read his response at his blog, I Am A Blog

The Third Man

When watching old movies, I find myself thinking one of two things. It's either “Wow, why don't they make them like that anymore?” or it's “Wow, I'm sure glad they don't make them like that anymore.” I felt both over the course of watching The Third Man, a 1949 thriller where the plot is constantly restated in the dialogue for the first 45 minutes as if they were expecting the audience to show up a half hour late, then suddenly shifts gears and turns into some of the most compelling, gripping filmmaking I've ever seen for the second half.

What Happens

The movie begins with pulp novelist Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) arriving in post-war Vienna which, because of the partitioning between the four Allies, is halfway between police state and total anarchy. Martins was told by his friend Harry Lime that he could get some work, but upon arriving Martins finds that Lime has just died after getting hit by a car. Suspiciously, nobody can quite agree on the details of the accident, and everybody involved seems to be some sort of swindler or smuggler who has some vested interest in hiding the truth.

Martins juggles the all of these accounts, none of which hold any water and all of which foreshadow so strongly that the characters may as well end every line of dialogue with “Dot dot dot, Mr. Martins...” He also encounters all the old standbys one would expect in a film such this; he falls for Lime's vampy mistress and is hassled by the British investigator handling Lime's case. Suddenly, Lime (Orson Welles, as it is turns out) is back on the scene alive and well, and here is where the movie takes a sharp turn for the exciting. Martins has mixed feelings about Lime after finding out about his crimes (he'd been selling second-rate penicillin and is responsible for the deaths of many sick children), but Lime turns out to have a cynical yet oddly compelling worldview behind his actions.

I'll stop summarizing here. I don't mind spoiling the first half, but the second half really needs to be seen to be appreciated.

What's Really Going On

The first half seemed to be setting us up for a competent yet boring romp through old-time Hollywood-style filmmaking – a sarcastic yet cocksure American shows up in Europe and plows his way through an investigation by brutish smooth talking, hard drinking and lady-charming. His investigative technique isn't particularly delicate or clever, he just runs up to a person and asks what they know in the rudest way possible, his only apparent motivation being his cynicism. He ignores everyone's well-meaning advice to leave the matter be. He feels like he deserves something from everyone even though he has nothing to offer them. He thinks he can seduce the girl. He thinks that he's smarter than the police. And nobody truly confronts him or attempts to prove him wrong for 45 minutes.

Once Lime shows up, Martins is no longer the star of the show and has to finally think about all of the advice he'd ignored, even though everyone had been freely offering it to him since the moment he arrived. He no longer has all the answers, he's caught up in forces he doesn't understand, and Lime actually is the free thinking and enterprising spirit Martins only pretends to be. He betrays his friend and doesn't get the girl, nobody has a happy ending, and things end up worse than if he'd just left it be like everyone told him. The very character traits he'd flaunted at the beginning of the film were a facade to mask his equivocating nature, and his inability to live up to his ideals only causes more misery for everyone.

All in all, this is a wonderful movie if you're willing to endure conventions from 1949 that later became cliché.

Comments: First half uninteresting, but sets up amazing second half

Deserves to be on Top 100: Yes

Inspired: Seven; person being hunted portrayed by star whose presence in the movie was planned as a surprise; movie takes unexpected change in pacing and tone; we learn that character's true motives in one big conversation in a confined space.

Statement of purpose

There are many, many, many blogs out there, most of which don't need to exist. Most of those that don't need to exist already cover the very topics I plan on covering here in this one. So why even bother?

The idea to start my own blog came while trying to explain the proceedings at this year's E3 Convention*** to my roommates, who are somewhat nerdy in their own ways. There were some genuinely exciting announcements about Portal 2 and the use of Steam on the PS3, about Kinect (though it's probably getting a bit overblown), and even Shigeru Miyamoto's demo of the new Zelda game's use of Wii MotionPlus was fun if glitchy, so I thought it was worth bringing up.

As I tried to explain all this, I realized they weren't exactly engaged. They were being polite as I yammered on about video game stuff, but they didn't exactly have the same casual point of reference that I did (try explaining Steam in a hurry).

Meanwhile, I've started watching as many of the AFI Top 100 films as I can before the end of the summer, I'm catching up on the latest Alan Moore comics while keeping tabs on the AL stats. All this while writing my thesis and making it to band practice twice a week.

So it occurred to me...instead of boring my friends with my nerdy thoughts on things they don't care about, I'll get it all out of my system by blogging about it...which is quite possibly even nerdier. But at least it'll organize my thoughts while giving my friends a break.

What I'm not is a "buff" on any of these topics. I'm a fan, but I claim no special authority or insight into a specific medium. What I am is someone who feels that the best video game can be just as meaningful and effective as the best film, that illustrations in a graphic novel are every bit as effective as the written word, and that fans of sports and fans of Sci-Fi have more in common than they may think. There is no contradiction in loving Star Trek: The Next Generation and planning your entire week around catching the NBA playoffs; in having both Miles Davis and Lady Gaga on the same playlist; or in reading Dante's Inferno while playing Dante's Inferno.

Let's see how this goes.



***(The E3 Convention, for those who don't know, is sort of the Iowa Caucuses of the gaming world - nothing that happens there really matters, there are no games actually released, and the whole thing is just one big bellows ready to blow smoke up the consumer's ass. It doesn't actually matter all that much to the consumers, just the industry and the media, much like the Caucuses. The average gamer doesn't much care how much money is spent on Sony's presentation, nor does the average voter care about any aspect of the Caucuses.)