The Third Man (1949)

Directed by Carol Reed

I’ve said of Alfred Hitchcock that one of his distinguising features was to place an ordinary and decent man in extraordinary circumstances, and to have him come out triumphant, often out of the webs of evil that international espionage manages to spin. That, I think, is a profoundly Christian story line. The hero is not to be found among the high and mighty, the ambitious, the wealthy, the prominent, but from where you least expect it. Beowulf the boy was unregarded, considered dull and sluggish. The life of the good merchant Antonio, and the very soul of the intelligent and not so good Shylock, are saved by a young woman dressed up as an apprentice lawyer — as a mere boy. The little girl Heidi brings her grandfather, dour and misanthropic, back to fully human life and to faith in God.

The screen writer of our Film of the Week, Graham Greene, did the same sort of thing in many of his novels: we get the unnamed “whisky priest” in The Power and the Glory, a girl fallen into the dark side of city life in Brighton Rock, and here, an author of rather cheap fiction who ends up in post-war Vienna looking for a friend of his who is supposed to have died, struck by a car. He hears some scuttlebutt, from those present at the scene, that there was a “third man” helping to carry the body from the street, but nobody can identify who that man is. The friend, one Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten; Holly’s a man, short for “Hollis,” I suppose), finds himself embroiled in a tangle of international crime that is staggeringly wicked and deadly in its results. For his friend, whom he probably never knew well, Harry Lime (Orson Welles), was making money by selling diluted penicillin on the black market, resulting in countless deaths, and strains of bacteria resistant to the antibiotic.

With shrewd irony, Greene takes his motif of the “third” man — and here I’ve taken my lead from our Word of the Week, three — from the story in Luke’s gospel, of the two men walking on the road to Emmaus after the Resurrection, when suddenly a third man is walking beside them. It is the risen Lord, whom they do not at first recognize, while he carefully explains the Scriptures to them, how the Messiah had to suffer and to die, and rise again. Dante plays on that same scene in his Purgatorio, when Virgil and the pilgrim poet are climbing the mountain, and suddenly a third man is beside them — he turns out to be the classical poet Statius — and wishes for them the peace of God. It was an important scene for T. S. Eliot too, as he alludes to it in “The Waste Land” and “The Four Quartets.” Greene, the Catholic convert, of course knew all this. Yet in this story, the “third man” is a shady, empty-souled, death-dealing man of avarice and cynicism. The scene at the Ferris wheel, Vienna’s “Riesenrad” or “Giant Wheel,” is one of the most famous and unsettling in all of film history, as Lime expresses to Martins his contempt for all the little people below, mere ants, nothings, to be crushed at will.

I’ve mentioned Hitchcock and Greene and Welles, but it’s not as if the director of this film, Carol Reed, was a nobody. In my opinion, he was second only to David Lean as the greatest of all British directors, and it’s a close second at that. We’ve featured his work here a couple of times, work that shows us the sorry side of human life, but that engages our feelings all the more for it: see his sure hand in The Fallen Idol, with Sir Ralph Richardson cast against type as a cowardly butler engaged in an illicit affair, but adored by his employer’s small boy. And of course he’s the man orchestrating the acting and the cinematography and everything else in Oliver! In The Third Man, we have him directing Orson Welles, himself a great director, along with a very strong supporting cast, including one of our favorites, Trevor Howard, as Major Calloway, of the Royal Military Police, on the lookout for Lime.

There’s also the scene-stealing performance of Baroness Alida Maria Laura Altenburger von Marckenstein-Frauenberg (!), otherwise known as Alida Valli, or simply by her stage-name, Valli; Italy’s answer to Ingrid Bergman, a star with a very long and wide-ranging career. The final scene of the film is hers, and only the greatest of actresses could have pulled it off.

The British Film Institute named The Third Man as the greatest British film of all time. I’d name The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance for that honor in the United States. Post-war Vienna, and the wild west — the one in danger of collapsing from civilization, the other verging upon civilization; and no easy political answers in either one.

Our film this week is available free on Tubi (with ads) this week.

Word & Song bthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well as a Friday podcast, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. To support this project, please join us as a subscriber and please share our posts.