This article is taken from the March 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
The British Film Institute has voted The Third Man (1949) the greatest British film ever. John Walsh’s new book surveys the setting (Vienna), the director (Carol Reed), the actors Joseph Cotten (Holly Martins), Orson Welles (Harry Lime), Alida Valli (Anna Schmidt) and Trevor Howard (Major Calloway), the screenwriter Graham Greene and the zither player Anton Karas, as well as the film locations in Vienna and near London, and Reed’s influence on other directors.
The Third Man has the same setting as Christopher Isherwood’s fictional description of Viennese politics and filmmaking in Prater Violet (1945). Three years later, during the Cold War, the city was divided into four sectors separately controlled by the British, Americans, French and the Russians, who were hostile to the Allies.
The innovative camera angles, like the tilted floor and billiard table in Van Gogh’s Night Café, evokes the bombed-out grandeur of postwar Vienna. “The wide-angle lens distorted the buildings, emphasised the wet cobblestone streets … and suggested that something crooked was going on.” The zither strings appear behind the titles, and their speed and volume, lyricism and menace emphasised the emotions of the scenes. The zither music was as effective and famous as Maurice Jarre’s balalaika music in Doctor Zhivago (1965).
Anna wears a fedora hat like Ingrid Bergman’s in Casablanca. When Martins meets Anna in her flat, she confesses that she’s in mortal danger. Love blinds her to Lime’s evil and she’s still fatally infatuated with him. She won’t marry Martins, even to get an American passport that would free her from perilous repatriation to Communist-controlled Czechoslovakia.
The recognition in the doorway of Harry Lime, whom Martins believed to be dead, is one of the greatest scenes in the history of cinema. Graham Greene wrote: “A window curtain was drawn petulantly back by some sleeper he had awakened, and the light fell straight across a narrow street and lit up the features of Harry Lime.”
Anna’s cat is Lime’s witch-like familiar spirit. After the cat has refused to play with Martins’s string in Anna’s flat, she explains that “he only liked Harry”. In fact, Carol Reed lured the cat by rubbing Lime’s shoes with sardines, enticing it to play with his shoelaces.
Lime, a shade of Greene, also suggests slime. Famous for his chaotic direction and costly overruns in Citizen Kane, Welles was impressed by Reed’s careful speed and efficiency, exclaiming “Jeez, this is the way to make pictures!” He also told him, “Carol, I can’t play this part! I can’t do it. I can’t work in a sewer. I come from California! My throat! I’m so cold!” The sewers were reconstructed and shot at the Shepperton Studios, southwest of London; the Vienna cemetery was also recreated and the Ferris wheel cabin scene was filmed with back projection.
Minor characters were brilliantly played by German actors with distinctive and wicked faces. There’s an excellent conversation between Martins, who speaks no German, and the porter in Lime’s building, who speaks a little English but has something important to tell him. Dr Winkel corrects Martins’s pronunciation of his name to Vinkel.
Welles appears for only ten minutes of screen time but dominates the film
Baron Kurtz, named after Conrad’s anti-hero who goes mad in the jungle in Heart of Darkness, lies by claiming that Lime’s “dying words were reserved for Holly”. In Conrad’s novel, Marlow falsely and protectively tells Kurtz’s fiancée that “the last word he pronounced was — your name”. All these nasty characters warn Martins not to get mixed up in Lime’s death.
Herbert Halbik, the moon-faced and slightly sinister little Hansl — playing with a large ball, wearing a large beret, shorts and long overcoat — was only three years old. He “appeared to track Holly through the streets of Vienna and accuse him of murdering Lime”. His appearance and character influenced the portrayal of little Oskar in The Tin Drum (1979).
Joseph Harbin, named after a city in Manchuria that housed many refugees from Nazi Germany, worked at a military hospital and obtained penicillin for Lime. In order to escape, Lime murders him and uses the corpse to replace his own.
Lime himself is the missing Third Man who appeared at the scene of his accidental death. Lime and Harbin diluted the penicillin with water and increased its weight with sand, and the doctored drug killed children with meningitis. Major Calloway called Lime “the worst racketeer who ever made a dirty living in this city”.
Welles appears for only ten minutes of screen time but dominates the film. In a superb scene, Lime tests the moral beliefs of Martins, who came to Vienna to work for Lime, selling his poisoned drugs on the black market. As they are looking down on the crowd, Lime ruthlessly asks: “Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money?”
Greene also makes a connection between Lime’s adulterated penicillin and the police pursuing him in the claustrophobic sewers. Nicholas Wapshott, Reed’s biographer, states, “The wide, brick-built sewers were reached from the street by staircases leading down from ventilation points disguised as advertising kiosks.”
Unlike the city, which was split into four separately ruled sectors, there was no such division below ground. Like Coleridge’s “caverns measureless to man”, “the sewers were constructed alongside the Wien River that flows to the Danube”.
In this ironic Resurrection story, Lime is pronounced dead, comes back to life, and is killed and buried again. In the burial scene in the cemetery, like the chase in the sewer, he is underground. Anna could either walk off arm-in-arm with Martins in a traditional happy ending, or — in the superior conclusion used in the film — walk past him without a sign of recognition.
In this drama of friendship, betrayal and hypocrisy, the critic Rob White observes that the Viennese “have seen how war destroys morality; they have learned lessons about survival and pragmatism; they hide despair in cynicism”.
The Third Man represents the influential gold standard for perfect script and directing, expert acting and photography, realistic background, serious message and evocative music. Eminent directors, including Stephen Frears, Peter Bogdanovich and Martin Scorsese, have paid tribute to Carol Reed, who himself made some perceptive remarks about the director’s work and silent impact:
All I believe the director can do is to approach the subject with a meticulously prepared list of scenes to be shot with their general description and the dialogue entailed in each, and an absolutely clear idea of the effect he wants to achieve … I don’t think a director should stand out. The audience should be unconscious that the damned thing’s been directed at all.
