The Third Man (1949)

Film: The Third Man

Director: Carol Reed

Country: UK

Released: September 1949

Runtime: 108 minutes

Genre: Film Noir

Studio: London Films / British Lion

Influenced: Hitchcock, Michelangelo Antonioni, Roman Polanski, Matt Dillon, Steven Soderbergh

The late 1940s marked a crisis in British cinema, affecting even the largest studios, and from which many never recovered. A row between the British government and Hollywood over taxation led to a temporary embargo on American films in the UK, and this in turn caused some studios like Rank to ramp up their production to fill the gap in the market. But when the ban was overturned in 1948, the market was flooded again with American films and domestic ones lost out. Alexander Korda's new company, British Lion, was soon on the verge of bankruptcy, and even the Rank Organization was suffering. In July 1948, the UK government announced approval of the National Film Finance Corporation to provide loans for British filmmaking. This rescued Korda and helped through productions like Carol Reed's The Third Man.

The Third Man is Britain's contribution to the film noir genre and it's a belter. Reed's reputation was on the rise after the critical success of Odd Man Out (1947), a thriller set in Northern Ireland that is stylistically similar to The Third Man. Korda introduced Reed to the novelist Graham Greene, and Reed's next two films were based on screenplays by Greene: The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man, co-produced by David O. Selznick and Korda. Selznick's involvement led to the casting of American actors Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten in two of the leading roles. One of my favourite facts about the film is that, while shooting it on location in Vienna, Reed came across Anton Karas, the zither player responsible for the film's music, in a courtyard outside a small Viennese restaurant. The sound of the zither is a key component of the film's uniquely strange atmosphere.

With its cast featuring Welles and Cotten, its off-kilter camera shots (Dutch angles) and its dark atmosphere, The Third Man is clearly influenced by Citizen Kane. Cotten plays the role of Holly Martins, a struggling American writer who becomes embroiled in a web of intrigue after arriving in Vienna to visit his old friend, Harry Lime (played by Welles). As Martins digs deeper into Lime's shady dealings, while navigating Vienna's labyrinthine plazas and alleyways, he discovers that nothing is quite as it seems, and that the line between good and evil is blurred. Martins, writer of simplistic cowboy novels, starts off seeing the world with a moral clarity about what is right and wrong, but this starts to dissolve in the jaded company of the Europeans he meets. It's no coincidence that the title of the lecture he's asked to give is on the subject of the "crisis of faith". 

Moral ambiguity is a feature of many film noirs but in The Third Man it becomes a theme of the film itself. Reed and cinematographer Robert Krasker employ inventive camera angles to emphasise how the simplistic moral compass of Martins is starting to tilt. The film's iconic finale showing Martins walking away from the camera, becoming smaller and smaller until he disappears into the shadows, further emphasises this sense of isolation and uncertainty, and serves as a commentary on the post-war era, a time of confusion and upheaval in which individuals were struggling to find their place in the world. To underline that further, there's the odd closing scene of Valli (played by Anna Schmidt) choosing to walk past Martin at the end, upending audience expectations about an embrace between them.