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.
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