# Third Man, The (1949)

### reviewed by
Cheng-Jih Chen

It's unclear what I can possibly add to what's already been said -- and said better -- about this film. While "The Third Man" doesn't have the single line "one and only" review from Pauline Kael attached to it, it certainly is up there among the acknowledged masterworks from the 1940s, and it has certainly been commented on.

Since it's now the 1990s, Film Forum is presenting "The Third Man" for a 50th Anniversary run (http://www.filmforum.com/3rdman.html). This is the somewhat longer British version. The difference is about eleven minutes and an introductory voice-over from the director. I've seen this film -- the American version -- once before but it was a long time ago, when I was at Berkeley. If I remember correctly, it was shown as part of a not particularly interesting class on existentialism (such classes are sometimes there for those who aren't sure of what they're in school for, I think) (we also saw "Hiroshima, Mon Amour" and "Woman of the Dunes"). I was probably in the process of dropping out of graduate school at the time, and my recollection of the film is somewhat fuzzy, more a remembrance of certain images, bits of plot and Orson Welles's celebrated entrance than anything else. I can't tell you where the differences between versions are.

Briefly, the plot involves a naive American writer arriving in postwar Vienna to see an old friend. Upon arriving, he finds that his friend is dead: he was hit by a car while crossing the street a few days before. Because parts of the story don't add up -- initially, he simply doesn't believe the police when they say his old friend ran in vicious circles; later, he learns that there was a mysterious third man at the accident site -- he begins investigating the circumstances of the death. He becomes entangled in the Viennese underworld as he digs deeper, and is attracted to his friend's girlfriend, Anna.

The film winds through like a long nightmare, complete with absurd incidents and the incongruous zither music. This is how it should be; the plot, after all, has the familiar nightmare of arriving someplace and finding the world upside down. The film's dreamscape is a ruined Vienna, the skyline with the spiral of the Stephansdom visible but pockmarked (http://info.wien.at/e/mus/mus02081.htm), piles of rubble everywhere, skeletons of buildings appearing all too frequently, prominent inhabitants who don't quite achieve normalcy, and bystanders who watch and stare. And this is merely daylight, above ground Vienna. We also see a nighttime Vienna of long, Expressionist shadows, surreal chases, weirdly lit sewers, and Orson Welles's entrance underneath an accidental shaft of light. All these things in the film are tuned perfectly.

This world of "The Third Man" is a surreal one of arbitrary forces -- the confused authority of the governing Allied Armies is the most visible example -- where moral choices are made in an ethical vacuum. Much is gray, from the evil Harry Lime showing a light side in helping Anna, to the crusader Calloway using others as tools for emotional manipulation. This ambiguous morality is solely created by one's self. And I suppose this is why the film was shown with that Existentialism class.

The review above was posted to the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due to ASCII to HTML conversion.

Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews