Film Club No. 001

A crooked city, a crooked camera and a man who doesn’t know what sort of story he’s in.

1. The Programme

Director: Carol Reed
Screenplay: Graham Greene
Starring: Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard
Filmed: 1948, principally in Vienna, Austria, with studio work in London
Released: 1949
Cinematography: Robert Krasker
Primary Genre: Film Noir
Secondary Genre/s: Mystery, Thriller, Crime

Vienna, shortly after the Second World War. The city is divided between four occupying powers, its buildings bear the scars of bombing, and its population is struggling to survive amid shortages, corruption and a thriving black market.

Into this uncertain landscape arrives Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), an American writer of cheap Western novels. He has come at the invitation of his old friend Harry Lime, who has promised him work. Unfortunately, Lime has been killed in a road accident shortly before Holly’s arrival.

The circumstances of his death are not entirely convincing. Neither are the people who claim to have witnessed it. Holly begins asking questions, encountering a British military policeman (Trevor Howard) and Lime’s former lover Anna (Alida Valli), both of whom seem to know rather more about his friend than he does.

What follows is a mystery set against the ruins of a European capital, where old friendships, personal loyalties and conventional ideas of right and wrong become increasingly difficult to reconcile.

Directed by Carol Reed from a screenplay by Graham Greene, The Third Man has become one of the defining British films of the postwar period. Its reputation rests not simply on the mystery at its centre, but on the remarkable way Reed chooses to tell it.

2. Keep Your Eyes Open

Nothing is quite on the level

One of the first things to notice about The Third Man is that the camera frequently refuses to remain upright.

Buildings lean, streets slope and characters appear at uncomfortable angles. These are known as Dutch angles, and Reed employs them with unusual enthusiasm.

There is a temptation to regard this as merely a stylistic flourish, an attempt to make a thriller look more dramatic. But consider the world Holly has entered. The city is physically damaged, politically divided and morally uncertain. Even the simplest facts are difficult to establish.

The camera makes this instability visible.

Watch how often Holly appears uncomfortable within the frame, and how Reed uses architecture to make individuals seem small or isolated. Just as importantly, notice the occasions when the camera is level. What changes when the world suddenly appears more orderly?

A city with a starring role

Vienna is not simply a picturesque setting.

Reed and cinematographer Robert Krasker use the city’s surviving imperial grandeur alongside its shattered streets, empty squares and shadowy passageways. The contrast is extraordinary. Here is a city that was once the centre of a great empire, now reduced to a place where cigarettes, medicine and favours can carry more practical value than money.

Look at how frequently characters are separated by architectural features: doorways, staircases, windows and long corridors. The city seems to offer endless opportunities to observe others without being observed.

There is also a striking relationship between light and darkness. Street lamps create pools of illumination surrounded by almost impenetrable blackness. Shadows stretch across walls and pavements, sometimes seeming more substantial than the people casting them.

The effect is recognisably film noir, but Reed takes it beyond the familiar American cityscape. Vienna’s monumental buildings and damaged infrastructure lend the film a character of its own.

Try imagining the same story taking place in a prosperous, brightly lit city. How much of its power would remain?

The sound of something being wrong

The music is another surprise.

Most thrillers of the period would have relied on an orchestral score to establish suspense and emotional weight. Reed instead uses Anton Karas, a Viennese musician playing the zither.

The result is immediately distinctive. The music can be jaunty, almost cheerful, even when the events on screen are anything but.

Rather than simply reinforcing the mood, the score sometimes appears to contradict it.

Listen to the way the music changes your relationship with the story. Does it make events seem less threatening, or somehow more disturbing? Does it suggest that the film is not taking its characters quite as seriously as they take themselves?

And notice when the music disappears. Silence can be just as deliberate a choice as sound.

The wrong man for the right story

Holly Martins is an unusual protagonist.

He is neither a detective nor an experienced adventurer. He writes Westerns, stories in which the good and bad characters are generally identifiable and the hero can restore order through determination and courage.

Holly seems to believe that the real world ought to operate in much the same way.

Joseph Cotten gives him a mixture of stubborn confidence and bewilderment. He is capable of considerable determination, but his certainty frequently exceeds his understanding.

Watch how other characters respond to him. Notice how often Holly asks the wrong question, misunderstands an answer or assumes that his personal loyalty gives him a better grasp of events than the people around him.

The film’s mystery is partly an investigation into what happened to Harry Lime. But it is also an examination of what happens when a man accustomed to simple stories finds himself in one that refuses to be simple.

The art of withholding information

Finally, pay attention to what Reed chooses not to show.

Much of the film’s tension comes from incomplete information. We hear accounts of events without witnessing them, encounter people whose motives remain uncertain and discover details that alter the significance of earlier conversations.

Reed also uses the camera to control what the audience knows. A figure may be concealed by darkness, a scene may be framed to exclude something important, or a reaction may tell us more than a lengthy explanation.

Rather than treating the film as a puzzle to be solved as quickly as possible, consider how it manages your curiosity.

What are you being encouraged to assume? And how much of that assumption comes from the characters, rather than from anything you have actually seen?

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SPOILERS FROM THIS POINT ON…

3. After the Credits

The friend who wasn’t dead

Harry Lime’s eventual appearance is one of cinema’s great entrances.

After spending much of the film hearing contradictory accounts of Lime’s death and character, we finally encounter the man himself. He is revealed not through a dramatic speech or elaborate confrontation, but through a sudden pool of light illuminating a doorway.

For a moment, Orson Welles’ face emerges from the darkness, wearing an expression of amused recognition.

It is an extraordinarily economical piece of filmmaking. A character who has dominated the narrative through his absence suddenly becomes real, and the entire story changes direction.

The revelation also transforms Holly’s position. He is no longer simply investigating his friend’s death. He must decide what to do about the living man he has discovered.

The cuckoo clock and the cost of civilisation

The meeting between Holly and Harry on the Wiener Riesenrad, Vienna’s great Ferris wheel, provides the film’s moral centre.

Harry looks down at the people below and casually reduces them to insignificant dots. His argument is essentially that individual lives matter very little when weighed against the opportunities available to someone sufficiently ruthless.

Welles plays the scene with extraordinary charm. Harry is relaxed, articulate and amusing. He is also responsible for selling diluted penicillin, causing terrible suffering and death.

The contrast matters. Reed doesn’t present evil as something necessarily ugly or obviously threatening. Harry’s appeal is part of the danger.

His famous comparison between the violence of Renaissance Italy and the supposed cultural sterility of peaceful Switzerland is an entertaining piece of cynicism. It also provides a convenient excuse for a man who wants to enjoy the benefits of civilisation without accepting responsibility for the people who sustain it.

The speech is seductive because Harry delivers it so well. But charm is not an argument, and wit is not a moral defence.

Holly finally chooses a side

Throughout the film, Holly’s loyalty to Harry competes with the evidence of his friend’s crimes.

His eventual decision to cooperate with the authorities marks a significant change. The man who arrived expecting to defend his old friend must accept that friendship does not excuse everything.

But Reed refuses to make this a straightforward heroic transformation.

Holly’s actions contribute to Harry’s death, and the final pursuit through Vienna’s sewers reduces the charismatic criminal to a desperate fugitive.

The underground setting is particularly effective. The man who looked down on humanity from the Ferris wheel now struggles beneath the city, surrounded by darkness, water and iron grilles.

There is a visual symmetry between the two sequences. Above the city, Harry imagined himself detached from ordinary human concerns. Beneath it, he discovers the limits of that detachment.

Holly’s final encounter with Harry also complicates the conventional distinction between justice and mercy. Doing the right thing does not necessarily mean doing something pleasant, and moral clarity offers little protection from personal grief.

One of cinema’s great endings

The final scene is perhaps the film’s boldest decision.

After Harry’s funeral, Holly waits beside the long cemetery road as Anna approaches. We might expect reconciliation, perhaps even romance. Holly has exposed a criminal, risked his life and demonstrated his willingness to act according to his conscience.

In a conventional Hollywood narrative, these qualities might earn him the woman he loves.

But Anna walks straight past him.

Reed holds the shot for an unusually long time. There is no reassuring exchange, no last-minute change of heart and no suggestion that Holly’s actions entitle him to Anna’s affection.

The composition is almost brutally simple. After a film filled with tilted angles, dramatic shadows and elaborate movement, the camera remains still while a woman walks down a road.

The effect is devastating precisely because Reed refuses to embellish it.

Anna’s loyalty to Harry may be difficult to defend, but it is hers. Holly cannot expect her feelings to conform to his understanding of what is right.

The film ends by denying its protagonist the reward that his own fictional heroes might have received.

Why The Third Man endures

The mystery at the centre of The Third Man is engaging, but it is not especially complicated once its secrets have been revealed. That is not what makes the film worth revisiting.

Its achievement lies in the relationship between story and form.

The tilted compositions express instability. Vienna’s architecture reflects a civilisation struggling with the consequences of war. The zither provides an ironic counterpoint to the violence and corruption. Joseph Cotten’s performance gives us a protagonist whose understanding of events is consistently less sophisticated than his confidence suggests. Orson Welles, appearing comparatively briefly, creates a character whose charm threatens to overwhelm our judgement.

And the ending refuses to resolve the story according to the conventions Holly himself would recognise.

None of these elements exists in isolation. Together, they produce a film in which almost every creative decision contributes to the same underlying questions about loyalty, morality, self-deception and the difficulty of seeing people as they really are.

That is why The Third Man remains worth watching. Not because its reputation demands our admiration, but because it demonstrates how cinema can communicate ideas through images, sound, performance and the spaces between words.

It is a film that rewards attention. And on a second viewing, knowing the mystery’s solution, there is arguably even more to see.