The Third Man

Noir goes abroad

Setting has always been important to film noir. Los Angeles and the Hollywood dream factory was where Billy Wilder shot two of his classics: Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard. It’s also where Raymond Chandler’s PI Philip Marlowe, most famously played by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep, was located. Even Roman Polanski had a go at the genre, setting his neo-noir masterpiece Chinatown in Los Angeles during a scorching drought. All of these classics, all of these Los Angeles. And then there’s The Third Man: undisputedly a classic noir film but set on the other side of the world to the Hollywood Hills.

Instead director Carol Reed — and writer Graham Greene for that matter — chose to throw their protagonist, pulp fiction writer Holly Martins, into post-war Vienna, a boiling pot of conspiracy and intrigue. The narrated opening to the film informs us that Vienna is divided into four between the Americans, the British, the French and the Soviets. Though The Third Man maintains the noir tradition of the dark city presented as a fragmented labyrinthine environment, and all the smoky jazz clubs and underground gambling dens that come with that, this is not the usual world of failed actresses and sleazy capitalists. Rather this is a world of racketeers and military-men.

Holly Martins is not your typical Hollywood hero either. From the off he is shown to be a foreigner in an unfriendly land. Characters often speak in German — unsubtitled — and we feel as alienated as Martins. He is out of his depth as he tries to uncover the mystery behind his friend Harry Lime’s untimely death. The porter in Lime’s apartment building spills the beans, suggesting that there was a third man who carried Lime’s dead body away, as opposed to the two that others had suggested, and it is this mystery that drives the plot. Paranoia sets in as Holly delves deep into the Viennese underbelly — a paranoia brought on by his ever-increasing alienation and isolation in a dark, dangerous Vienna.

And there’s a girl. Anna, the woman that Harry Lime left behind — she still wears his pyjamas, his initials embroidered into them — who Martins falls hopelessly in love with, as is the tradition of the film noir. Is she a femme fatale, or just merely a femme? The conventions of the genre are always at play here, constantly informing our expectations as the narrative progresses. Alida Valli plays her brilliantly, giving away little. Like most of the people Martins meets, we don’t really know whether we should trust her or not.

She consistently calls Martins Harry by accident. His ghost still looms. He is a man whose reputation precedes him, for better or for worse. And it is the big reveal of the film — Harry Lime is not dead — that is perhaps the single greatest character introduction in the history of cinema. In one shot — Orson Welles’s Lime emerges from the darkness, the camera draws in and has there ever been a more perfect smug grin? — Reed literally flips the entire film on its head as victim becomes perpetrator and everything we and Martins knew up to this point is thrown into contention. In a moment of comic irony, Martins is almost hit by a car crossing the street to greet him, and before he can, Lime has disappeared down the dark alleyways of the city. Has Martins’s paranoia got this bad? Is he just seeing a ghost? A hallucination? Either way, there has not been many moments in the 67 years since this film was released that equal the confidence, the sheer gutsy arrogance of this moment. Moments like these perfectly encapsulate the magic of the movies.