I remember thinking, when I did the AFI Challenge in 2018, that The Third Man was something of an odd choice for their list. Despite the presence of two prominent Americans in the cast, it’s not really an American film. It’s actually a British film. Why did the American Film Institute count it? I mean, it’s an excellent film. I won’t deny that. But as far as I know, it’s the only film on their list that isn’t American.
But it is one of Orson Welles’s finest performances as that amoral asshole Harry Lime.
To be clear, I do believe Harry Lime is amoral as opposed to immoral. An immoral man would know right from wrong and actively choose wrong while an amoral man wouldn’t know the difference between right and wrong, or so I was taught in 12 years of Catholic school. Harry Lime’s actions are undoubtedly wrong, but he doesn’t seem to do anything out of any sense of morality. He only really cares about his own bottom line. If doing the right thing will earn him more money in the mess that is postwar Vienna, he will. Given the shortages, there is an argument to be made that he is meeting a need within the city by smuggling antibiotics to those in need. OK, he does so by watering them down after stealing them from military hospitals and selling them to civilian hospitals, an action that led to the deaths of children, but for Harry Lime, the lives of strangers don’t matter much. Welles famously ad-libbed the line about how Italy gave the world the Renaissance and the Swiss developed the cuckoo clock, and while not historically accurate, it is a good summation of Harry Lime’s general overall philosophy: death can lead to good things, so why bother being good?
However, the thing about Harry Lime, even as the most compelling character in the film, is he is barely in it. He doesn’t appear until around the halfway point, and he doesn’t say anything until there’s only about a half-hour left. In fact, most if not all of his spoken dialogue is in a single scene. Welles knocks it out of the park with his performance, and his first appearance, complete with a small, devilish grin, is one of the most memorable first appearances in film. In point of fact, given Welles was probably the biggest name in the film, and how rare it is to introduce a major villain to any film that late, the fact that he more than justifies his presence here as the shifty monster that he is leads most fans to have a lot to say about Harry Lime. I mean, I know I did the first time I covered this film.
But this is a new challenge, so I need to find a new angle to talk about the film again. So, why not focus a bit on the other prominent American in the film, namely frequent Welles collaborator Joseph Cotten as Holly Martins, the closest the film has to a protagonist? Normally, a protagonist is someone with a goal that various forces are trying to stop, and Martins’s goal, upon his arrival in Vienna, is to find his childhood friend Harry Lime. The thing is, Martins is completely ignorant of what Harry has been up to in Vienna, nor is he aware of what kind of person Harry actually is. And I think that is the key to understanding Holly Martins: he is a very ignorant man.
Now, I don’t mean “ignorant” as “stupid” so much as I mean he is generally uninformed or unaware of what’s going on. There’s a temptation to suggest Holly represents the standard American, someone who lives in a land that was largely indirectly touched by the war, a land of prosperity and not the lawless mess that is Vienna, divided as it is between the victorious allied powers after the fall of Nazi Germany. I mean, the guy writes Western novels, that most American of genres, and just about every character in the film that has read one of his books seems to like them, some enthusiastically. But Harry is also an American, so I think that analogy breaks down a bit as a result.
Instead, consider Holly’s overall plans. He arrives in Vienna to see his friend. He learns his friend just died in an automobile accident. Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) of the British Military Police wants Holly to leave Vienna pretty much immediately, but Holly feels like there’s something wrong. Everything he hears about Harry doesn’t jibe with the man he knows. He doesn’t want to believe that Harry was, well, evil. To a certain extent, that makes sense. it is a very hard thing to do to think ill of a person we know, especially someone we consider a friend. It’s why “conflict of interest” is even a thing. The Harry Lime Holly knows is a good friend, a decent man who Holly just wants to spend some time with. Somehow, Holly has never seen this darker side to Harry Lime.
But that fits in well with other issues too. Holly initially gets Calloway’s name wrong, calling him “Callahan.” That prompts an immediate correction from Calloway to say he is English, not Irish. Holly is asked to say a few words at a literary meeting from people who are ostensibly fans of his work. However, they think he’s joking when he refers to Zane Grey while he seems absolutely clueless when asked about James Joyce. And for all that Holly is trying to be helpful and maybe even a wee bit dashing when it comes to Harry’s abandoned girlfriend Anna (Valli), he completely misreads her in the last few minutes of the film as someone who might want him around. He gets Calloway to stop and let him out of the car he’s in after Harry has been dealt with, and she just ignores him.
You know, if this were a more Hollywood sort of film, she probably would have rushed into his arms. But it isn’t, so I think it points out that Holly is a pretty clueless guy. Well-meaning, sure, but the fact that he hasn’t seen Harry since September of 1939 and that war changed Europe and everyone there tells me he’s just not up to the task of living here. No wonder Calloway keeps telling him to leave the city and go home to America.
Now, I would say Holly does prove helpful when he finally learns the truth, but it takes Calloway’s taking him to a hospital to show him dead and dying children to make that point. And apparently, the cynical Calloway is the narrator of author Graham Greene’s novel, making me want to check that out sometime. I suspect that Holly’s overall ignorance and intrusiveness is much worse there for some reason, but I’m not at all familiar with Greene’s work. Quite frankly, now I’m intrigued. But I have enough unread books at the moment. I’ll try to get to that later…maybe.
In the meantime, there’s still some Stacker films to get to.
NEXT: Well, looks like I get to see an cinematic exploration of another world capital, one I know very little about. Be back soon for the 2011 Iranian film A Separation.
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