2020 Tarkovsky Prize Second Place: Huckleberry Shelf
Post-War Paranoia and American Privilege in The Third Man
By Huckleberry Shelf (18, Ruth Asawa School of the Arts)
Carol Reed’s The Third Man weaves seamlessly together two very disparate stories. One is the obvious crime story revolving around black market racketeer Harry Lime and hack novelist Holly Martins. The other exists in the crevices and side streets of the first; it is a document of the pervasive intensity of fear and paranoia, both specifically in post-war Vienna and generally in life after the second world war. The second story constantly exists underlying the first one, showing the American privilege that is at the root of both Holly Martins’ heroism and Harry Lime’s evil.
Paranoia is everywhere in the way the film is shot. Dutch angles are used constantly, which makes everything feel skewed and wrong. This technique, combined with a subtly expressionist harshness of contrast in the black and white, allows cinematographer Robert Krasker to create a constant dark atmosphere. One shot that is particularly striking comes when the international police arrive to arrest Harry Lime’s old girlfriend Anna Schmidt. It’s a shot from above of the staircase. On the left, Schmidt’s landlady looks up towards Schmidt’s room, speaking German (presumably railing against the behavior of the police). On the right, the police ascend the stairs, but the lighting is such that they cast shadows over one another until the only thing you see is their shadows moving. The police, intended to be a protective force, become an object of fear, and their shadows advance on the viewer. Throughout the film, figures are skewed and cast in shadow, until the viewer isn’t sure if they can trust anyone.
The fear that runs through Vienna is also shown in how the general citizenry is portrayed. We are shown a city where those who aren’t criminals have been cowed into patterns of inaction. The porter at Lime’s building blows up when Martins asks him to go to the police, seemingly knowing that being involved with the law or with the lawless in any capacity will only end poorly for him. The camera cuts often to the faces of bystanders; always in shadow and always seemingly retreating from the camera. Fully understanding that fear requires looking at the context around it. This is a city that has just lost a war and is in complete turmoil. It has been split suddenly into four completely new governments. Those who live comfortably feel acutely the precariousness of that comfort, and know that in a city so volatile the best thing to do is nothing.
It’s hard to live in Reed’s Vienna and not have some connection with illegal activity. This is portrayed mostly in subtext, through small interactions. Resources are clearly scarce. When Martins gives Anna’s landlady a few cigarettes, she thanks him like they’re made of gold. Anna has a bottle of whisky an American theatregoer has given her, but rather than drink it, she is keeping it to sell. The general assumption made by the characters in this film is that they can’t take anything for granted, and the knowledge they have is that whenever they need money the black market is there waiting.
Holly Martins enters this city completely innocent of that assumption and knowledge, and so he floats around with impunity, barely paying any mind to the damage he causes. He comes into a precarious situation, and acts before he knows anything, trying to avenge his friend who he later learns is little better than a mass murderer. He barely seems to register the death of the porter. His brash heroics are something uniquely American, reflected in the pulpy Westerns he writes; he believes himself throughout the movie to be the center of something. He thinks that he has something that no one else does, either some knowledge or some drive. When it’s finally true, and he can be the hero and bring down Lime, it begins to feel wrong to him. Lime is his friend, and he can’t conceive his friend as the great evil of a western novel. This is reflected in the way the final chase scene through the sewers is shot. Rather than focusing on the heroic Martins, the camera fixates on Lime, and for the whole time Lime looks trapped and terrified. He appears not as a great criminal but as a cornered animal. He is pitiful, and the viewer is drawn to pity him, despite how many people he’s hurt and killed. Reed, in the way he designs this scene, is rejecting the American novel, where the bad guy is vanquished and everyone is happy. There is no question that Lime is evil but he’s also Holly’s best friend and Anna’s lover. Nothing is as simple as Martins has made a career of making it out to be.
What’s interesting is that, despite his many flaws, Lime rejects the privileged mindset that Martins has. In the famous scene where Holly confronts Lime in a ferris wheel, Lime reminds Holly that nobody is a hero, and that nobody deserves a spotlight. Furthermore, he understands the corruption in authority that Martins can’t seem to see. “No one thinks in terms of human beings anymore,” he says. “Governments don’t, so why should I?” By having Harry Lime make these criticisms that Reed has been leading the audience to for the whole film, but making them in service of justifying his murder of hundreds of innocent people, Reed forces you to confront the greyness of everyone’s morality.
At the end of the day, both Americans are two sides of the same coin; they are both using the people around them to get where they want to go. The only difference is Martins is using them through his privileged obliviousness and Lime is tactically exploiting them. Thanks to Reed’s ability to so strongly portray the mood and temperament of the citizenry of Vienna he can leave almost all of this under the surface of what would otherwise be a simple crime story. The ramifications of the story, however, are profoundly changed. Where otherwise, when the villain is defeated, one might be left with a feeling of relief, the ending of The Third Man feels empty. One is left with the sense that with or without Lime nothing will change in Vienna. It is a damaged city, and it will stay damaged in a way that shooting one man could never fix. That’s all that Lime is at the end of the day, just another man. Martins comes to this realization, just as the film ends. He stands at the side of the road, Anna walks past him, and he realizes that what he did amounted to next to nothing. No girl, no glory, just a dead friend.