The Third Man (film)

The Third Man (original title: The Third Man) is a British film noir released in 1949 directed by Carol Reed. It stars Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles and Alida Valli. The script was written by Graham Greene. It is considered a masterpiece: it ranked 57th on the American Film Institute's list of the best American films in 1998, despite being a mainly British and Hungarian production, and in June 2008, the same institution (AFI) revealed that ranked fifth among classic American mystery films, or thrillers, in a survey of 1,500 of its members. On the other hand, it has always been in the top five of all the lists of the best British films of all time.

Synopsis

Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), writer of western pulp novels, arrives in dilapidated post-war Vienna in 1947, when the city is still divided into four zones occupied by the allies of the Second World War. Holly arrives claimed by a childhood friend, Harry Lime (Orson Welles), who has promised her a job. But the same day he arrives coincides with Harry's funeral, who has been hit by a car. Holly meets and is attracted to Anna, who was Harry's girlfriend.

Faced with a series of conflicting facts (some say there were two witnesses, others three), Holly begins to investigate the death of her friend, suspecting that he may have been murdered. The head of the British military police shows him that her friend was involved in shady deals on the black market, specifically in the smuggling of diluted and therefore ineffective penicillin.

Plot

The black market for basic necessities thrives in a dilapidated and impoverished Vienna after World War II. Occupied by the Allies, it is divided, like Berlin, into four sectors controlled by each of the occupying forces: American, British, French and Soviet; these powers share the duty of applying the law in the city. American cheap western writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) comes to town looking for his childhood friend, Harry Lime, who has offered him a job. Upon arrival, he discovers that hours earlier, Lime had been hit while crossing the street by a speeding truck. Martins attends Lime's funeral, and there he meets two British Army policemen: Sergeant Paine (Bernard Lee), an admirer of Martins's novels, and his superior, Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), who tells him that Lime was a criminal and suggests that he leave town.

Official Crabbin (Wilfrid Hyde-White), of the British occupation forces, misinformed by Paine and believing that Martins is a major author, approaches him and asks him to give a lecture, and in exchange offers to pay for your accommodation. Seeing in this an opportunity to clear the name of his friend, Martins decides to remain in Vienna to investigate the outrage. He then receives an invitation from another friend of Lime's, the "baron"; Kurtz (Ernst Deutsch), who tells him that he and another friend, Popescu (Siegfried Breuer), carried Lime to the sidewalk after the accident. According to Kurtz, before Lime died, Lime asked him and Popescu to take care of Martins and Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli), an actress who was Lime's girlfriend.

Hopeing to gather more information, Martins goes to see Anna perform at the theater; she suggests to him that Harry's death may not have been accidental. She then accompanies him to question the doorman of the building where Lime lived. The doorman says that Lime died immediately, so he could not have given any instructions to his friends before he died, and also claims that Kurtz and Popescu did not move the body alone, but were helped by a third man. Martins scolds him for not reporting it to the police. Then, concerned for the safety of his family, the doorman is outraged and tells Martins not to involve him. Soon after, the police, searching Anna's apartment for evidence, find and confiscate her fake passport and arrest her. Anna tells Martins that she is a Czechoslovakian national and that if she is found out by the Russian authorities, she will be deported from Austria.

Martins visits "medical adviser" from Lime, Dr. Winkel (Erich Ponto), who says that he arrived at the accident when Lime was already dead and saw only two men present. Later, the doorman secretly offers Martins to give him more information, but he is killed before Martins can keep the appointment they had made. When Martins arrives, unaware of the murder, a boy, the janitor's son, recognizes him from having seen him talking to him earlier and points him out to the crowd at the crime scene, who turn hostile to him. Having managed to escape from them, Martins returns to the hotel; he is then forced into a taxi. He fears that the taxi driver is driving him to his death, but actually turns him over to the book club to give the promised lecture to the official Crabbin. With nothing prepared, he improvises until Popescu, sitting in the audience, asks him about his next book. Martins replies that he will be called The Third Man, & # 34;a story of murder & # 34; inspired by real events. Popescu tells Martins that he should stick with the fiction. Martins sees two thugs approaching him and runs away.

Calloway again recommends that Martins leave Vienna, but Martins refuses and demands that Lime's death be investigated, as he already believes it to be a murder, not an accident. Calloway reluctantly reveals that Lime had been stealing penicillin from military hospitals to resell it on the black market, so diluted that many patients had died. In postwar Vienna, antibiotics were new and in short supply outside military hospitals, commanding a high price. Calloway's evidence convinces a disillusioned Martins that he agrees to leave Vienna.

The Noria of Vienna, one of the locations used in the film.

Martins visits Anna to say goodbye and discovers that she also knows about Lime's misdeeds, but her feelings for him have not changed. Anna tells him that she is going to be deported. Leaving her apartment, Martins notices someone watching from a dark door; a window suddenly lit by a neighbor briefly reveals that person hidden in the doorway to be the "late" Harry Lime (Orson Welles), who flees despite Martins' calls and inexplicably disappears. He tells Calloway, who deduces that Lime has escaped through the sewers. British police immediately exhume Lime's coffin and discover that the body is that of Joseph Harbin, a nurse who stole penicillin for Lime and who disappeared after becoming an informant.

The next day, Martins goes to visit Kurtz and demands to see Lime, who comes out to meet him. They go up to the Ferris wheel in Vienna, where Lime veiledly threatens Martins' life, though he puts it down when Martins tells him that the police already know that his death and funeral were a hoax. In a monologue about the insignificance of his victims, Lime reveals the full extent of her amorality. She again offers Martins a job and leaves. Calloway asks Martins to help him lure Lime to capture him and Martins agrees, but asks in exchange that Anna be able to get out of Vienna safely. However, Anna refuses to leave, and she remains loyal to Lime; Exasperated, Martins decides to leave Vienna alone, but changes his mind when Calloway shows him the children who have fallen victim to Lime's diluted penicillin, their brains left irreparably damaged by meningitis.

Lime goes to the date with Martins, but Anna, still loyal to Lime, arrives and warns her just in time of the trap. Then Lime tries to escape again through the sewers, but the police chase him in them too. Lime shoots and kills Paine, but Calloway shoots and mortally wounds him. Still alive, Lime crawls up a ladder to a grated manhole cover facing the street, but he is unable to lift it. Martins picks up Paine's revolver, follows Lime and catches up with him; then he hesitates. Lime looks at him and nods. A shot is heard. Later, Martins attends Lime's second funeral. At the risk of missing his flight out of Vienna, Martins waits in the cemetery to speak to Anna, but she walks past him without even looking at him and off into the distance.

Cast

Production

Although from the outset he was asked to write the script for a film set in post-war Vienna, with the firm presence of the four occupying powers, Graham Greene opted to write the plot in novel form beforehand. The only way, he assured, to be able to plan the script, which would later be prepared by the novelist himself and by the producer, Alexander Korda. Greene always defended that the film version was much better than the book (including the ending, which is different), which did not prevent it from being edited anyway and becoming a classic. The Smuggling of Diluted Penicillin in Vienna was inspired by real events known to Graham Greene through the Viennese spy Peter Smollett:

The history of penicillin trafficking was based on a sordid truth, so much sordid that many of the traffickers were innocent, unlike Lime. A surgeon I knew took two friends to watch the movie and surprised him to depress a film that had fun for him. They told him that, at the end of the war, when they were with the Royal Air Force in Vienna, they had both dealt with penicillin. They had never seen the consequences of that robbery until they saw in the film the scene of the children's hospital, in which they used watered penicillin..

The script by existential writer Greene masterfully concocts the amorality of the hidden main character, Harry Lime, after the collapse of idealism that brought about World War II: «Today nobody thinks in terms of human beings; Governments don't do it, why do we? They talk about the people and the proletariat, and I talk about the fools and wimps, which comes to the same thing; they have their five-year plans, so do I. Orson Welles' contribution to the film as a whole seems evident Welles, who had problems with his productions in Hollywood, decided to make the leap to Europe, where he directed and collaborated on several projects, including this film by Carol Reed. His first on-screen appearance (the flick of a lamp showing Harry Lime to Cotten's shocked face) has been hailed as the best introduction of a character on film. Expressionist traits also stand out, such as the Dutch shots by Carol Reed, the sequence shot at the end and the equally memorable scenes of the Ferris wheel and the underground chase through the Vienna sewers. A contribution to the script is also his; a sentence was needed to conclude the scene at the Ferris wheel, and Orson Welles was reminded of something he had read:

Remember what Nose who said: in Italy, in thirty years of Borgia domination, there were wars, massacres, murders... But also Michelangelo, Leonardo and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, on the contrary, they had five hundred years of love, democracy and peace. And what was the result? The cuckoo clock!.

• It was shot in London Film Studios (Shepperton, England). The exteriors were shot in Austria.
• The music of Anton Karas, played by himself in citara, was a success and came to the first places in 1950.
• It is also worth highlighting the photograph in black and white and the selected exteriors, which show various facets of the city of Vienna, such as the Noria of Vienna del Prater or the Viennese sewers, frame of the famous scene of the final persecution.

Awards and nominations

Oscars

Oscar Award 1951:

• to the best black and white photography (Robert Krasker)

BAFTA Awards

BAFTA Award 1950:

• to the best British film

Cannes Film Festival Award

1949 Cannes Film Festival Award:

• Gram Prize (Carol Reed)

Candidacies

Oscar Award 1951:

• the best director (Carol Reed)
• the best assembly (Oswald Hafenrichter)

BAFTA Award 1950:

• to the best film of any origin

1950 Directors Guild of America Award:

• to the extraordinary benefit in direction – cinema (Carol Reed)

• It forms part of AFI's 10 Top 10 in the category of "Mystery Films".

• It forms part of the AFI's 100 years... 100 films in post number 57.