Last week I saw The Third Man in the theater for the third time... or was it the fourth?
It is one of the greatest movies ever made, and along with Lawrence of Arabia, the iconic British movie, even if starring Americans and made in Vienna; and unlike Lawrence, it's a perfect movie--not a single wasted moment or gesture.
We could say that The Third Man is about politics, but it goes beyond politics straight into the question of evil. To watch The Third Man is to be sucked into a world of shadows and corruption. Darkness is visible here. The night streets illuminate with rain reflecting the lamps. These streets have seen things past our imagining. The movie is filmed on location in the bombed out Vienna of the immediate postwar, and the very faces are lined with proximity to evil. Every extra seems reduced to humiliating poverty, and with every friendly and hostile face, you wonder if these are the faces of Nazis.
The main character, Holly Martins, is the American innocent: a writer of pulp Westerns, full of conventional notions of good and evil, convictions that have no place in a world of war where one barters for very life and basic necessities must be purchased through the black market. Even the Dutch camera angles (sideways) tell us that we will not understand these characters if we look at them conventionally.
The black market is ultimately what The Third Man is about; the selling of false penicillin that kills. Large parts of the movie are in the sewers, where the underworld escapes capture and moves their product invisibly to eyes accustomed to thinking they see the way the world works.
Holly Martins comes to Vienna at the request of his friend, Harry Lime, but Lime has died just before Martins gets there. Martins goes to the police. The police shrug and tell him Lime got what came to him. Martins doesn't believe them, but what he discovers is beyond his comprehension.
The music is nothing more than a zither, a mainstay of Austrian folk music. The folk cliches of the music seem to mock us for trusting that we'll find truths more comforting than what's here. It seems to shrug, "the world is what it is."
The Third Man is commonly called the best movie ever made without an author (auteur). The director is Carol Reed, a very fine director but Orson Welles he wasn't. Yet when presented with a script about eternal questions, Reed rose to it as few directors ever have.
Who authored the script? Graham Greene himself, author of famous novels like The Quiet American and The Power and the Glory, where politics is just a theater where far more elemental situations play out. Questions are asked about evil: what is this omnipresent force that ruins so many chapters in our lives; more basically he asks, what is the lesser evil?
In The Third Man, Vienna becomes a metaphor for vileness and decadence. This movie is a place where everything good goes to seed, and decent people turn to rot.
They made this movie during the film noir age, and it may be the best noir of all. Film noir teems with darkness, where cold hard men travel in shadowy night--men chastened by an era of war and poverty; their illusions betrayed by life.
Old Vienna haunts my dreams the way the American Dream haunts yours. Old Vienna was a dream before the American Dream, a dream going all the way back to Beethoven and Schubert: a dream not of freedom but culture. Sure, there was politics, but culture was the obsession. Every free moment was spent at the theater, the concert hall, the art gallery, the cabaret, the dance halls, and those hundreds of coffeehouses where the public talked about everything they saw. Intellectuals were stars, and denied academic posts (so many were Jews...), most of them were forced to write for the layman whom they had to entertain. Even thinkers like Freud and Wittgenstein wrote with clarity. The short epigram was as important as the philosophical tome, and the favored literary form was the 'feuilleton,' a magazine devoted to fiction, criticism, and light subjects - politics found nowhere. In Old Vienna, the chambermaids woulf cry when great actresses died. Culture was the reason for being, and it's a dream I've always had for the US too: a place time isnt spent writing mean comments on twitter but at the movie theater, the rock venue and jazz club, and with cheap sports too I guess. A country with enough appreciation for culture that artists can make a secure living, just like doctors and lawyers. Few would be worshipped like superstars, but so many would be loved as artists, appreciated by a wide public who knows to keep an open mind, yet passionate enough to debate which artists are best.
And just like the American Dream, it's such a false image of reality. The ultimate proof? When the Nazis came, Vienna hawk tuah'd with an enthusiasm equaled by few Germans. While middle class Jews fancied it an intellectual paradise, it turned out that these apolitical goyim were political indeed, and wanted desperately to be German. Even the Archbishop of Vienna met Hitler with a Sieg Heil. Austrians call themselves Nazis' first victim. Quatsch. They were the Nazis' greatest acolytes. While Germany devoted eighty years to atonement, there's no acknowledgement of Austria's willing partnership.
And now, in 2025, we come face to face with the American Dream's dark side. It's not political to want success, security, stability and freedom. These are universal dreams, as basic as food, no less or more universal than the desire for art and thought. Yet what rot lies behind them? Will people who long for freedom and stability send others with the exact same desires to their deaths when their dream is threatened? Will they blame peoples rather than leaders? Will they blame the ideas of others before they look into the flaws of their own? Will they double down on the same sorts of authorities after every catastrophe? And once the catastrophe comes, will people who thought their morals unimpeachable do unimaginable things to keep their positions secure?
A bombed out country and continent could be our future, and works like The Third Man foretell it. Austrians had reasons for believing as they did, just as we all do, but they crossed a moral bridge from which there's no return, and they paid for it with exactly what they deserved.
