The Third Man
With Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard, Bernard Lee, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Ernst Deutsch, Siegfried Breuer, and Erich Ponto.
Korda, the Hungarian-born British producer, played a much more active and creative role on the film than Selznick. He’d also developed many previous film projects for Welles to direct, though none of them ever came to fruition (including Around the World in 80 Days, Cyrano de Bergerac, War and Peace, an American version of Pirandello’s Henry IV, and two original scripts, V.I.P. and Operation Cinderella). But not even Korda qualifies as the movie’s principal auteur. In fact, it’s doubtful that the movie can be read in auteurist terms at all. Like Gilda and Children of Paradise, it’s an anomaly whose special qualities come from a series of creative convergences rather than from a single dominant artistic sensibility–another reason people might fantasize that Welles directed parts of it.
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To this Reed added the Wellesian visual motifs of shadows and tilted angles, though they don’t function as dramatic and metaphysical markers but simply conjure up a mood and atmosphere: shadows equal mystery and skulduggery, tilted angles mean everything’s slightly off-kilter. It’s a loose strategy for depicting the rubble-strewn Vienna of that period, which had been sliced into American, British, Russian, and French zones with an international zone for the police at the center. Another strategy was hosing down the cobblestone streets and shooting most of the film at night to allow Robert Krasker’s high-contrast cinematography to capitalize on all the murky ambience, and Greene’s own background as a spy undoubtedly enhanced the sense of intrigue. Yet for all the art of Greene’s storytelling, it wasn’t until Reed added the solo zither music of Anton Karas–most of it recorded in Reed’s house in London–that the picture acquired the “unity and movement” cited by Farber. This is why I find it easier to speak about artfulness and stylishness in this movie than about art and style; its pleasures are less those of a unified expression than those of several independent discourses merging in superficial harmony.
Out of several of Welles’s radio scripts for The Adventures of Harry Lime grew his screenplay for Mr. Arkadin (1955), with its own black-marketeering protagonist, set in a similar world of postwar European corruption and crime. (As if to acknowledge its source, Arkadin literally restages one shot from The Third Man–a giant close-up of an eye behind a magnifying glass.) But here the Lime role is taken over by the completely uncharismatic Guy Van Stratten (Robert Arden), while Welles plays a Russian tycoon of mysterious origins.
