Man Down

Leaving aside the zither, the initial theme of the 1949 film The Third Man, which is currently available in a 4K restoration on BBC iPlayer until the end of the month, is denial: I didn't see anything; I know nothing; I don't want to get mixed up with the authorities. This has an obvious resonance in the immediate postwar era when so many were insisting "I was never a Nazi" and the Austrian state was attempting, with the connivance of the occupying powers, to recast itself as the Third Reich's first victim rather than the country that birthed Adolf Hitler and welcomed the Anschluss. As the film progresses, denial gives way to confession and threat, and finally to betrayal. Many have seen the film as another expression of Graham Greene's overwrought Catholicism, with Harry Lime playing both Jesus and Satan: a man who rises from the dead and tempts Holly Martins while showing him the world from on high ("If I offered you £20,000 for every dot that stopped - would you  really, old man, tell me to keep my money?") But that is to ignore what gives the film its unique stature: the central role played by Vienna itself - something that owes more to the direction of Carol Reed and his adjustments to the screenplay than it does to Greene's original story.

As a review of the Third Man Museum, an institution that reflects the Austrian ambivalence about the film, noted: "Beneath its modern polish, Vienna is still grand, absurd and slightly sinister: an imperial capital without an empire". The Viennese disregard for a film that exhibited the city's postwar embarrassment contrasted with its popularity in Britain. It might well have been less popular if the screen version hadn't cast Americans in the central roles of the charming sociopath and his old schoolfriend, and had instead stuck with the British characters of Graham Greene's novella. Instead, the British in the film - Major Calloway and Sergeant Paine representing hard power and the cultural attaché Mr Crabbin representing soft power - are portrayed as both honourable and useful. Despite Indian independence in 1947 and the early stages of the Malayan "Emergency", imperial decline did not yet obtrude for a British public still celebrating victory and focused on the domestic promise of the Attlee years. 

The post-imperial melancholia of the film would become more poignant as the UK retreated from empire and the administrative heart of London came to resemble Vienna in its faded grandeur (as a London Film production, the first thing you see on screen is a sooty Big Ben). The very title of the film would become shorthand for Cold War betrayal and the moral decadence of the British ruling class. This aesthetic resonance, together with the avoidance of romantic delusion, helps explain why the film continued to pack a punch and is still today regularly voted as one of the best films of all time (it topped the BFI's poll of the greatest Britsh films of the twentieth century in 1999). Though they represent an occupying power, Trevor Howard's Major Calloway and Bernard Lee's Sergeant Paine gradually come to seem like organic products of the city: cynically familiar with local mores and in tune with the wry humour of a people fallen on hard times. It is Joseph Cotten's Holly Martins and Orson Welles's Harry Lime who are most obviously alien, not only in their manners and respective ignorance and disregard but in their New World optimism, whether that of the crook who spies opportunity or the blundering naif who won't give up on either his friend or the girl. 

The ruins of the Austrain capital reflect more than the aftermath of World War Two. They evoke the trauma of World War One: the collapse of the "old Vienna" referenced by the opening narration (voiced by Reed) rather than just another Central European city flattened by carpet bombing. It is hardly coincidental that Lime's apparent death occurs in front of the statue of the Emperor Franz Joseph and the accident is witnessed by a Baron and a Romanian and then attended by a passing doctor, representatives of the artistocracy, multi-national polity and haute bourgeosie of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Though The Third Man's ruined landscape shares a superficial similarity with the Trümmerfilm of the late-40s, it is concerned with what lies preserved beneath the rubble, not just with what has survived on the surface. Holly Martins doesn't just metaphorically dig deeper into the mystery of his erstwhile friend's death, he literally descends into the underworld of the sewers. But the parallel here is not with Orpheus or The Divine Comedy but with archaeology: the uncovering of layers of history and meaning compressed on top of each other. 

This sense of compressed history is famously articulated in Harry Lime's speech on the Prater Ferris wheel, the Wiener Riesenrad: an aperçu that collapses 500 years between the Renaissance and the cuckoo clock. The theme of compression is also seen in the constant focus on time and urgency: the need for Martins to catch the next plane out, his late arrival at the book club, Anna missing her train, the final delay at the cemetery that risks Martins missing another flight. A counterpoint to the theme of compression is that of collapse: visually the physical destruction of the cityscape and more profoundly the moral compromises occasioned by wartime and after. As Baron Kurtz admits, "I've done things that would have seemed unthinkable before the war". Again, this sense of collapse and compromise carries echoes of the past. Anna Schmidt, played by Alida Valli, is not just a contemporary displaced person facing the threat of repatriation to Czechoslovakia, she is also a remnant of the shattered Austro-Hungarian empire and a rebuke to Britain for the Munich Agreement of 1938 (Calloway holding up her "papers" in his hand and sharing them with the Russians evokes Chamberlain).

Another reason why the film has stayed relevant was that it presented Americans as both naive in the face of Old World sophistication (Martins' profession as a pulp novelist can be read as a parody of Henry James) and callously indifferent to the suffering they inflict, a combination that would become a leitmotif of US foreign policy up to and beyond Vietnam. Though one of the occupying powers, the US military is invisible in the film's Vienna. In the opening narration, Reed oddly says of the four-man international patrols (American, British, Russian and French) that "None of them could speak the same language". This suggests a reluctance to recognise the US's role as the global hegemon and the inevitable subordination of the UK. If we track the evolution of Greene's thinking from the burden of the British empire represented in The Heart of the Matter to the delusion of the emerging American empire in The Quiet American, then The Third Man can be seen as transitional: the morally jaded bureaucracy of Calloway and Crabbin giving way to the fast-buck opportunism and blundering indiscretion of Lime and Martins.

Visually, the film betrays multiple influences, from prewar German expressionism to contemporary Italian neorealism. The acting is a goulash of styles, from Welles's bravura theatricality to Howard's reticence. Though Harry Lime appears relatively briefly on-screen, his presence is felt for most of the film in the ironic amusement of Anton Karas's eponymous zither theme. When Lime finally loses his self-assurance in the sewer chase, the music stops to be replaced by a diegetic soundtrack of running water, shouts and footseps, only to return with the inevitability of the terminal gunshot. Despite the tragic storyline and sombre style, and Greene's religious imagery, it's also a surpisingly comic film, from the running joke about people forgetting or mispronouncing each other's names to Wilfred Hyde-White's Ealingesque cameo as Crabbin. Though it clearly wasn't conscious design on Reed's part, the absurdist policing and camp subtext of the criminal gang, together with Calloway's leather coat and Paine's cheerful brutality, seem to prefigure Joe Orton.

What finally distinguishes the film is its complexity, which in turn reflects its messy realism. The characters are both believable and unpredictable. Motivations seem uncertain throughout and there is no sense of just deserts, despite the criminal enterprise foiled. The blameless Sergeant Paine is dead, and both Holly and Anna are adrift, facing uncertain futures. Harry Lime is finally brought to rough justice, but he clearly invites his own death at the end, further embroiling Holly in moral compromise and guilt. Anna literally walks out of the film in the closing shots, calling into question both the temporal and spatial limits of the story. Holly originally introduced himself to Calloway as the author of "Death at the Double X Ranch" (another satirical touch), but it is the British Major who is clearly the expert on the subject of mortality: "Death is at the bottom of everything, Martins. Leave death to the professionals". That both our first and last sightings of Calloway are at the cemetery is not insignificant. He isn't an angel of death, but he is a connoiseur of the passing of old orders.