The Third Man

Some movies are worth your time only for one particular performance. A recent example would have been seeing Johnny Depp in Pirates Of The Caribbean. An earlier one that comes to mind was Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men: Jack had a couple of scenes early on and the courtroom scene at the end (“you can't handle the truth…”) and utterly filled the screen. The rest of that plodding film was just padding until Jack came back.

An even earlier example was way back in 1949. In the movie The Third Man, Orson Welles had, maybe, a total of fifteen minutes on screen, it's a solid hour into the movie before you meet him and yet his part dominates the film.

The Third Man follows an American, Holly Martins — played as a bit of a naïve optimist by Joseph Cotton, on his arrival in Vienna shortly after the war to find a friend of his, Harry Lime, but finds when he gets there that Lime has died in a motor accident. As Martins starts talking to Lime's associates and his girlfriend he gets suspicious about the death and keeps pressing to find the true story.

The screenplay is all noir thriller with questions of loyalty and morality and blah blah — written by Graham Greene no less — full of plenty of wit and speed. Oddly enough, though, I find the screenplay the least successful part of the movie. The plot is a little silly and some of the dialogue is dated and affected (“You were in love with him weren't you?” “I don't know. How can you know a thing like that afterwards? I don't know anything anymore except I want to be dead too”)

However, in one scene Welles and Cotton are on a ferris wheel, comparing the people below to tiny dots (“Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?”). They get to the bottom and Orson Welles, who wrote the speech himself, pulls out this cracker:

“In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed — they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly.”

It doesn't sound to me like a convincing justification for running a black-market penicillin racket but jeez it makes great cinema.

A more successful part of the movie was the black & white cinematography — Oscar-winning, in fact. There were crazy angles, harsh lighting, big shadows. It looks great.

The first time you see Orson Welles's character — as I say, a good hour into the movie — is a genuine, cinema-popcorn-choctops-curtain-raising moment: a cat meows and rubs against a pair of shoes, Martins yells, a light from a window hits the face of the figure across the road. Orson Welles is perfectly framed by the light and grins charmingly, teasingly at his old friend. It is a spectacular introduction to a character.

Certainly, another standout performance is that of Anton Karas, the musician who provided the unforgettable score to the movie. Played entirely on zither the music is utterly perfect. The jaunty and yet souless main theme — The ‘Harry Lime Theme’ which all of us have certainly heard before — seems to evoke the post-war Vienna the way nothing else could have. It was a stroke of genius to us it. Apparently, Karas was simply playing in a local restaurant for tips when Carol Reed — the director — came in for a meal during the Viennese unit photography. Reed was transfixed by the music and urged Karas to join him in London (staying in Reed's hotel room the whole time) to record the music for the film.

The music is delightful, the photography magnificent but all you remember after watching this film is just Welles's cuckoo clock speech and his glorious introduction in the doorway. His was that one particular performance.

The copyright on the movie has lapsed and you can watch the whole thing on Google Video.