The Third Man

12/01/2026

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Rubble Feelings

Rubble movies were inclined to realism. These were films that examined late-war and post-WWII Europe, using the found realities in cities like Rome and Berlin that were devastated by Allied bombing. Roberto Rossellini made a trilogy of them. The Germans called them Trümmerfilm, and there is perhaps no better example than Rossellini’s Berlin-set Germany Year Zero, made in 1947. Rossellini insisted ‘‘ I don’t want to put on a spectacle’’ (Cahiers du Cinema). In contrast, 1949‘s The Third Man is a rubble film that could be deemed all spectacle. Germany Year Zero absorbed its story into the sounds and sights of a busy Berlin, where people hectically tried to make ends meet in a determination to avoid meeting their end by starvation – brilliantly exemplified at the beginning when we see folks taking chunks out of a collapsed, dead horse as they try to put food on the table. The camera looks on.
In The Third Man, set in Vienna, the post-war years are no less evident. As the film tells us at the beginning, the city has been divided into four zones (French, British, American and Russian), with the centre controlled by the four nations. It no less importantly informs us that this is a place where the black market is prominent, with supply chains in the wake of the war benefiting the corrupt businessman, if not the non-professional. As Carol Reed’s film wryly shows us a body floating in the Danube, the voiceover notes that a situation like that does tempt amateurs, but they don’t tend to stay the course. While Rossellini’s film observes, Reed’s asserts. Both might take advantage of the post-war reality they find, but while Germany Year Zero would by most people’s reckoning fall under realism, The Third Man is clearly a stylistic work.
One way of viewing style is through assertion over observation. In the first couple of minutes, we have the voiceover not only telling us about the zones and the black market, but numerous cuts to illustrate the point. Reed shows us the suitcases full of goods, the numerous watches on one arm, and explains the zones with cuts to signs in the various languages. While observation relies chiefly on diegetic sound (though Rossellini does use music), Reed allows Anton Karas’s now-famous score to run through the film, contributing enormously to its sad, amused, cynical and sympathetic mood. It captures very well The Third Man’s ambivalent account of someone in the city catching up with a friend who might not be much of a buddy at all, and seems no longer to be a living one.
Those first few minutes, noting the black market and the various zones are vital to the film, and play out in various ways as we will discover that central character Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) might have a misplaced sense of his old buddy Harry Lime’s loyalty, but everyone else has an even greater misplaced sense that Lime (Orson Welles) is dead, and buried in the cemetry. The film explores three misguided realities: the first, Lime’s demise, the second Holly’s assumptions about the decency of Harry, and the third about Harry’s partner, Anna (Alida Valli) who remains stubbornly loyal to Lime when she assumes he is dead, and all over again when she realises he is alive, and once more when he really is dead.
We will say more later about the latter, which gives the film its richest component and its classic ending. But for the moment, let us attend to the first two and how they link to the black market and those zones. With Harry apparently six feet under, the important aspect of the story rests on Holly coming to understand that this friend he has known since his youth has been caught up in the most appalling of black market exploitation. Harry has been selling penicillin illegally, watering it down, and the consequences are shown to us when the British army police make clear that Harry needn’t be remembered fondly. Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) explains with the aid of a slide show just how involved Lime was and how awful the consequences were. Men with gangrene legs, women in childbirth and children who, if they weren’t lucky enough to die, went mad. Lime was no good guy, and it takes more than half the film’s running time for Holly to accept it. But when he finds out that Harry is still alive, does he feel some residual loyalty to a person he has known for many years over these patronising Brits who regard him as an idiot slow on the uptake?
Harry doesn’t only turn out to be alive, capable of hiding out in a city with its four zones; he is played by Welles, initially shown offering sly glances in a doorway, as the film cuts back and forth between a woman at the window, Holly and Lime. This is, of course, clever casting, with Cotton and Welles having worked together in Citizen Kane, which explored, amongst other things, their soured friendship. Cotton also took the leading role in Welles’ following film, The Magnificent Ambersons. These are men with a history, and a personal one too – the actors had known each other for several years before making Citizen Kane. By the time they meet properly, the film has turned Harry Lime into an enormous enigma, at a moment when Welles was an enormous celebrity. He comes with the baggage of everyone invoking him throughout the film, and meets it with the bulk of fame and frame.
His appearance is a piece of overstatement in a work that has turned the rubble movie into manifest style, a film that probably resembles as much Welles’ earlier films as Reed’s: as much Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons as Odd Man Out and The Fallen Idol. It is a style that can accommodate the theatrical and pushes towards the caricatural or the grotesque, as Welles would show in performances in several of his own films, including A Touch of Evil and Chimes at Midnight. In Welles’ key scene, Reed pushes instead of the canted camera angles the film frequently uses, the sway of movement contained within the scene. Looking to meet somewhere they won’t be followed, the pair are at a fairground and go up on the Ferris wheel. As Harry admits to Holly that he has indeed done the things the British army police claim, so the image sways at odd angles as we see Vienna in the background from on high, a city giddy with movement that the big wheel generates. The camera, which has offered low-angled obliqueness, shots of spiralled staircases from below, and askew shot-counter shots, can now film straight, but the environment will generate a wooziness of its own. The dizziness will become a property of the story, and not just the form. Lime says, ‘‘nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don‘t. Why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat. I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It is the same thing.’’ The background indicates the world has been turned upside down. Years of assumed friendship, becomes, on Holly’s part, a realisation that his world is not Lime’s. And yet Lime has a hold on Holly’s character, as though in Welles’ typically larger than life performance, Harry can suggest that his charm is greater than his deeds, his ability to wax lyrical capable of waning away the truth that would leave him as an atrocious individual.
But what will Holly do with this ambivalence? Will he help Harry or the police? Harry, on the big wheel, tells him that they are the closest of friends and any conflict is a misunderstanding, as Harry also asks Holly what he believes in after Holly says Lime once believed in God. In Vienna, he can believe in loyalty towards a friend or a duty towards the law, and this should be all the more clear-cut in that Harry hasn’t proved much of a friend and the legal issue isn’t simply that Harry has been working as a black marketeer, but that many have died as a consequence of his criminality. It shouldn’t be a conflict, and yet Harry has been buttering Holly up, while Calloway has usually been putting him down. The Major accuses him of blundering around Vienna, that he’s been behaving as a fool and that he was born to be murdered. He has also been mildly manhandled earlier in the film after trying to take a punch at Calloway when the Major alludes to Harry as a murderer. Harry gives Holly false credence; the British army police offer a more honest evaluation that is hardly likely to make Holly feel good about himself.
By the conclusion, he will take out Harry with an offscreen gunshot in the sewers of the city, a death suggesting that as Harry scuttles from place to place trying to survive, he will indeed die like the rat the cops believe he is, that Holly reluctantly accepts, and that Anna will never countenance.
While the British military police know that Harrys is a rotten egg, and that soft-boiled Holly needs the strongest of whiffs to accept this, no evidence can convince Anna to condemn Lime. Yet this isn’t because she is naive, like Holly, but because she is loyal to the Harry she knew, and no extraneous evidence will alter this perception. When Holly reckons she still has feelings for the man, she says: ‘I don’t want to see him, hear him. But he is still a part of me. That is a fact.’ She insists she couldn’t do a thing to harm him, as though the emotional reality she had with Harry is one thing; the accusations levelled against him are another. However, as we noted, this isn’t a failure of intelligence; it is perhaps even a manifestation of it. Harry was as good to her as he was awful with others, and she wouldn’t wish to confuse the two matters. The police need this conflation so that people who are close to Harry and whom Harry trusts can help them capture him. While, from a certain perspective, it isn’t a betrayal to contribute to catching a friend who has done atrocious things, since you are making the world safer as a consequence, one might feel they are making their own world more fragile because its emotional centre has been shattered. Holly can countenance this as a friend, but can Anna as a lover? She protects her integrity as she no doubt feels that Holly does not, and this isn’t only because she has more to lose than Holly does, but also because she believed in Harry as Holly perhaps never quite did. After Harry answers Holly’s question about God, Harry writes Anna’s name on the window of the Ferris Wheel compartment,  in that moment before he asks what Holly believes in. It is a rhetorical question, and Holly offers no answer. Anna would seem to see that Harry has faith in her and she respects that faith by refusing to help the police at all.
The famous ending is just after Harry’s funeral, with Holly, the man who, this time, makes sure Harry is dead in the grave. As the military jeep starts to drive him to the airport, Holly gets out and waits by the road, as Anna comes towards him. As she passes, she doesn’t acknowledge Holly, doesn’t even look at him, and keeps walking. It is a single take from a one-point perspective, with Anna walking along the tree-lined path from the far distance into the foreground of the frame, while Harry is on the left side. All the while, we hear Anton Karas’s score at its most melancholic and doleful. Formally, it is a wonderful scene, using the Central Cemetery outside Vienna, which has an interred population greater than the city itself. It is where countless famous personalities find their final resting place among the approximately three million deceased.’’ (Vienna Tourist Information) Vienna’s population is a little over two million. A cemetery so vast can beneft from a vanishing point.
It is worth saying a little more about how the film uses locations, fundamental respect for realism that almost everything else in the film counters. But we haven’t yet finished with Anna, who is responsible for the film’s ambiguous ending, because it is she who is difficult to read. Why does she walk past Holly with no recognition on her face at all? Is it the depth of contempt for Martins or the deepest of reveries as she will be thinking of Harry? It could, of course, be both, but if it is the former, it will rest not only on Holly taking out his best friend and her lover, but also on the assumption, as Holly stands there, that he might be the man to replace Harry in her affections. We would be unlikely to think that this was why he killed Harry, but his righteous deed, from a moral perspective, can seem a contemptuous one emotionally. If he sees himself as a better man than Harry, that may be true, as he is a writer of popular novels, rather than a black marketeer responsible for numerous deaths, but not when it comes to fidelity of feeling. Anna clearly doesn’t see in Holly’s deed the removal of a troublesome figure in Viennese life, but surely a sanctimonious gesture that she feels doesn’t reflect a higher value, but potentially a lowly desire. When Anna speaks to Holly earlier, she says, after Holly reckons she was in love with Harry, ‘I don’t know. How can you know a thing like that afterwards? I don’t know anything any more, except that I want to be dead too.’ Later, she talks about Harry in the fondest manner and how much she misses him, but she also couches this affection in practical terms. ‘He fixed my papers for me. He knew the right person for forging stamps.’ ‘You’ll fall in love again,’ Holly proposes. ‘I don’t ever want to’, she replies.
We might assume that Anna’s love for Harry is strongly integrated into the immediacy of the post-war years, and part of the dismissive attitude everybody has towards Holly, and nobody more than Anna, rests on his ignorance of this moment. While the others have seen and suffered, Holly appears to have had it easy Stateside, and requires the most harrowing of scenes to make him see realities he previously might have taken only as rumours. The Major takes him round a children’s ward with all the kids who are there, there as a consequence of Harry’s racketeering. It is a terrible sight, and yet, if Harry hadn’t been selling the penicillin, probably somebody else would have, and the film makes clear at the beginning that everything was up for sale, if people could afford the price. Harry isn’t the villain of the piece; more a piece of the postwar jigsaw at its most horrific. Anna might not romanticise Harry, but she appears instead to see him as someone who finds himself on the wrong side of history when circumstances become desperate. The chancer who at school knew how to fake his temperature to get out of an exam becomes the man in Vienna who dilutes the drugs that will destroy children’s lives.
It is here that we can understand the film’s form and feeling, the need to work with actual locations and in setting the project in the immediate post-war years. We could call Anna’s state throughout the film as one of ‘rubble-feeling, a sense of personal catastrophe meeting social despair, in a city where the sort of normal emotions Holly assumes don’t quite have the same validity. Thus, the director films post-war Vienna with a constant alertness to location, and it is understandable that when the British Film Institute details the ten best films set in the city, The Third Man is the first film addressed. Charles Drazin writes of its scriptwriter, novelist Graham Greene, being shown around the city by Elizabeth Montagu. She says, ‘‘I took him to the ruins, I took him to the places still standing, I took him everywhere you can think of, including the Great Wheel and all that. He became absolutely enamoured of Vienna.’ ‘(Criterion)
Greene was often a writer of ruinous situations if not always ruinous places, even if he often wrote about countries undergoing political transformation: Our Man in Havana, The Young American, The Heart of the Matter, The Honorary Consul. Characters are frequently in crisis and caught in seedy circumstances, and post-war Vienna suited his aesthetic temperament. The place proves a useful objective correlative to a moral qaugmire, and at the same time helps create it. When Anna says she didn’t know whether she was in love with Harry, even if everything she does indicates she was, this isn’t Anna trying to deny her feelings. It is more that she understands they were created at a particular time, in a particular environment. This wasn’t a transcendent love (whatever that might be, though Holly might well believe in it), but an imminent one, a love where so cynical a character like Harry can seem loveable, and in his way actually happened to be. Out of this type of situational love, an idealist like Holly can appear naive, smug and callow, and thus deserves to be ignored less for killing Anna’s lover than for killing his best friend for some perceived higher purpose.
This isn’t to propose that Holly is wrong and Anna is right. Harry Lime has been a menace, someone whose criminality has been the opposite of a victimless crime. But he understood Anna’s desperation much better than Holly, whose soft glances and tepid gestures would seem contemptible to a woman who understands that morality is a luxury many in the immediate post-war years couldn’t afford. Harry might not have been one of those who were desperate, but he could understand the lower depths more easily than the higher virtues, and would seem to have offered Anna a realistic life and not merely a better one. If many films in Europe after the war explored the architectural destruction in the strewn rubble, some also examined rubble-feeling. These are emotions that would appear in an environment which might seem inexplicable to those occupying a safer, cosier place. Anna would be one such character and can be better understood, probably, through reading ‚ Trümmerliterature’ writers like Wolfgang Borchert and Gunter Grass, than a noir prism that would propose her as potentially a femme fatale. That she is an enigmatic figure to Holly shouldn’t blind us to the fact that she needn’t be one to the viewer, if we read in her this rubble-feeling, and the trauma many felt coming out of the war.
The film is a great example of style as it takes a very different aesthetic approach to the image than the neo-realist films we initially invoked, but it does so all the better to capture a moral fragility that such an environment might engender: that amongs the rubble, people had to find a way to get by, and this wasn’t always going to be honest and decent. Holly might be the film’s characterisational centre, but from another perspective, he can appear very peripheral indeed as the film reflects less his indignant certitude than the city’s ethical chaos. It is one where, if the world hasn’t quite been turned upside down, it needs to be looked at from the most canted of perspectives.
 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

The Third Man

Rubble Feelings

Rubble movies were inclined to realism. These were films that examined late-war and post-WWII Europe, using the found realities in cities like Rome and Berlin that were devastated by Allied bombing. Roberto Rossellini made a trilogy of them. The Germans called them Trümmerfilm, and there is perhaps no better example than Rossellini’s Berlin-set Germany Year Zero, made in 1947. Rossellini insisted ‘‘ I don’t want to put on a spectacle’’ (Cahiers du Cinema). In contrast, 1949‘s The Third Man is a rubble film that could be deemed all spectacle. Germany Year Zero absorbed its story into the sounds and sights of a busy Berlin, where people hectically tried to make ends meet in a determination to avoid meeting their end by starvation – brilliantly exemplified at the beginning when we see folks taking chunks out of a collapsed, dead horse as they try to put food on the table. The camera looks on.
In The Third Man, set in Vienna, the post-war years are no less evident. As the film tells us at the beginning, the city has been divided into four zones (French, British, American and Russian), with the centre controlled by the four nations. It no less importantly informs us that this is a place where the black market is prominent, with supply chains in the wake of the war benefiting the corrupt businessman, if not the non-professional. As Carol Reed’s film wryly shows us a body floating in the Danube, the voiceover notes that a situation like that does tempt amateurs, but they don’t tend to stay the course. While Rossellini’s film observes, Reed’s asserts. Both might take advantage of the post-war reality they find, but while Germany Year Zero would by most people’s reckoning fall under realism, The Third Man is clearly a stylistic work.
One way of viewing style is through assertion over observation. In the first couple of minutes, we have the voiceover not only telling us about the zones and the black market, but numerous cuts to illustrate the point. Reed shows us the suitcases full of goods, the numerous watches on one arm, and explains the zones with cuts to signs in the various languages. While observation relies chiefly on diegetic sound (though Rossellini does use music), Reed allows Anton Karas’s now-famous score to run through the film, contributing enormously to its sad, amused, cynical and sympathetic mood. It captures very well The Third Man’s ambivalent account of someone in the city catching up with a friend who might not be much of a buddy at all, and seems no longer to be a living one.
Those first few minutes, noting the black market and the various zones are vital to the film, and play out in various ways as we will discover that central character Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) might have a misplaced sense of his old buddy Harry Lime’s loyalty, but everyone else has an even greater misplaced sense that Lime (Orson Welles) is dead, and buried in the cemetry. The film explores three misguided realities: the first, Lime’s demise, the second Holly’s assumptions about the decency of Harry, and the third about Harry’s partner, Anna (Alida Valli) who remains stubbornly loyal to Lime when she assumes he is dead, and all over again when she realises he is alive, and once more when he really is dead.
We will say more later about the latter, which gives the film its richest component and its classic ending. But for the moment, let us attend to the first two and how they link to the black market and those zones. With Harry apparently six feet under, the important aspect of the story rests on Holly coming to understand that this friend he has known since his youth has been caught up in the most appalling of black market exploitation. Harry has been selling penicillin illegally, watering it down, and the consequences are shown to us when the British army police make clear that Harry needn’t be remembered fondly. Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) explains with the aid of a slide show just how involved Lime was and how awful the consequences were. Men with gangrene legs, women in childbirth and children who, if they weren’t lucky enough to die, went mad. Lime was no good guy, and it takes more than half the film’s running time for Holly to accept it. But when he finds out that Harry is still alive, does he feel some residual loyalty to a person he has known for many years over these patronising Brits who regard him as an idiot slow on the uptake?
Harry doesn’t only turn out to be alive, capable of hiding out in a city with its four zones; he is played by Welles, initially shown offering sly glances in a doorway, as the film cuts back and forth between a woman at the window, Holly and Lime. This is, of course, clever casting, with Cotton and Welles having worked together in Citizen Kane, which explored, amongst other things, their soured friendship. Cotton also took the leading role in Welles’ following film, The Magnificent Ambersons. These are men with a history, and a personal one too – the actors had known each other for several years before making Citizen Kane. By the time they meet properly, the film has turned Harry Lime into an enormous enigma, at a moment when Welles was an enormous celebrity. He comes with the baggage of everyone invoking him throughout the film, and meets it with the bulk of fame and frame.
His appearance is a piece of overstatement in a work that has turned the rubble movie into manifest style, a film that probably resembles as much Welles’ earlier films as Reed’s: as much Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons as Odd Man Out and The Fallen Idol. It is a style that can accommodate the theatrical and pushes towards the caricatural or the grotesque, as Welles would show in performances in several of his own films, including A Touch of Evil and Chimes at Midnight. In Welles’ key scene, Reed pushes instead of the canted camera angles the film frequently uses, the sway of movement contained within the scene. Looking to meet somewhere they won’t be followed, the pair are at a fairground and go up on the Ferris wheel. As Harry admits to Holly that he has indeed done the things the British army police claim, so the image sways at odd angles as we see Vienna in the background from on high, a city giddy with movement that the big wheel generates. The camera, which has offered low-angled obliqueness, shots of spiralled staircases from below, and askew shot-counter shots, can now film straight, but the environment will generate a wooziness of its own. The dizziness will become a property of the story, and not just the form. Lime says, ‘‘nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don‘t. Why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat. I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It is the same thing.’’ The background indicates the world has been turned upside down. Years of assumed friendship, becomes, on Holly’s part, a realisation that his world is not Lime’s. And yet Lime has a hold on Holly’s character, as though in Welles’ typically larger than life performance, Harry can suggest that his charm is greater than his deeds, his ability to wax lyrical capable of waning away the truth that would leave him as an atrocious individual.
But what will Holly do with this ambivalence? Will he help Harry or the police? Harry, on the big wheel, tells him that they are the closest of friends and any conflict is a misunderstanding, as Harry also asks Holly what he believes in after Holly says Lime once believed in God. In Vienna, he can believe in loyalty towards a friend or a duty towards the law, and this should be all the more clear-cut in that Harry hasn’t proved much of a friend and the legal issue isn’t simply that Harry has been working as a black marketeer, but that many have died as a consequence of his criminality. It shouldn’t be a conflict, and yet Harry has been buttering Holly up, while Calloway has usually been putting him down. The Major accuses him of blundering around Vienna, that he’s been behaving as a fool and that he was born to be murdered. He has also been mildly manhandled earlier in the film after trying to take a punch at Calloway when the Major alludes to Harry as a murderer. Harry gives Holly false credence; the British army police offer a more honest evaluation that is hardly likely to make Holly feel good about himself.
By the conclusion, he will take out Harry with an offscreen gunshot in the sewers of the city, a death suggesting that as Harry scuttles from place to place trying to survive, he will indeed die like the rat the cops believe he is, that Holly reluctantly accepts, and that Anna will never countenance.
While the British military police know that Harrys is a rotten egg, and that soft-boiled Holly needs the strongest of whiffs to accept this, no evidence can convince Anna to condemn Lime. Yet this isn’t because she is naive, like Holly, but because she is loyal to the Harry she knew, and no extraneous evidence will alter this perception. When Holly reckons she still has feelings for the man, she says: ‘I don’t want to see him, hear him. But he is still a part of me. That is a fact.’ She insists she couldn’t do a thing to harm him, as though the emotional reality she had with Harry is one thing; the accusations levelled against him are another. However, as we noted, this isn’t a failure of intelligence; it is perhaps even a manifestation of it. Harry was as good to her as he was awful with others, and she wouldn’t wish to confuse the two matters. The police need this conflation so that people who are close to Harry and whom Harry trusts can help them capture him. While, from a certain perspective, it isn’t a betrayal to contribute to catching a friend who has done atrocious things, since you are making the world safer as a consequence, one might feel they are making their own world more fragile because its emotional centre has been shattered. Holly can countenance this as a friend, but can Anna as a lover? She protects her integrity as she no doubt feels that Holly does not, and this isn’t only because she has more to lose than Holly does, but also because she believed in Harry as Holly perhaps never quite did. After Harry answers Holly’s question about God, Harry writes Anna’s name on the window of the Ferris Wheel compartment,  in that moment before he asks what Holly believes in. It is a rhetorical question, and Holly offers no answer. Anna would seem to see that Harry has faith in her and she respects that faith by refusing to help the police at all.
The famous ending is just after Harry’s funeral, with Holly, the man who, this time, makes sure Harry is dead in the grave. As the military jeep starts to drive him to the airport, Holly gets out and waits by the road, as Anna comes towards him. As she passes, she doesn’t acknowledge Holly, doesn’t even look at him, and keeps walking. It is a single take from a one-point perspective, with Anna walking along the tree-lined path from the far distance into the foreground of the frame, while Harry is on the left side. All the while, we hear Anton Karas’s score at its most melancholic and doleful. Formally, it is a wonderful scene, using the Central Cemetery outside Vienna, which has an interred population greater than the city itself. It is where countless famous personalities find their final resting place among the approximately three million deceased.’’ (Vienna Tourist Information) Vienna’s population is a little over two million. A cemetery so vast can beneft from a vanishing point.
It is worth saying a little more about how the film uses locations, fundamental respect for realism that almost everything else in the film counters. But we haven’t yet finished with Anna, who is responsible for the film’s ambiguous ending, because it is she who is difficult to read. Why does she walk past Holly with no recognition on her face at all? Is it the depth of contempt for Martins or the deepest of reveries as she will be thinking of Harry? It could, of course, be both, but if it is the former, it will rest not only on Holly taking out his best friend and her lover, but also on the assumption, as Holly stands there, that he might be the man to replace Harry in her affections. We would be unlikely to think that this was why he killed Harry, but his righteous deed, from a moral perspective, can seem a contemptuous one emotionally. If he sees himself as a better man than Harry, that may be true, as he is a writer of popular novels, rather than a black marketeer responsible for numerous deaths, but not when it comes to fidelity of feeling. Anna clearly doesn’t see in Holly’s deed the removal of a troublesome figure in Viennese life, but surely a sanctimonious gesture that she feels doesn’t reflect a higher value, but potentially a lowly desire. When Anna speaks to Holly earlier, she says, after Holly reckons she was in love with Harry, ‘I don’t know. How can you know a thing like that afterwards? I don’t know anything any more, except that I want to be dead too.’ Later, she talks about Harry in the fondest manner and how much she misses him, but she also couches this affection in practical terms. ‘He fixed my papers for me. He knew the right person for forging stamps.’ ‘You’ll fall in love again,’ Holly proposes. ‘I don’t ever want to’, she replies.
We might assume that Anna’s love for Harry is strongly integrated into the immediacy of the post-war years, and part of the dismissive attitude everybody has towards Holly, and nobody more than Anna, rests on his ignorance of this moment. While the others have seen and suffered, Holly appears to have had it easy Stateside, and requires the most harrowing of scenes to make him see realities he previously might have taken only as rumours. The Major takes him round a children’s ward with all the kids who are there, there as a consequence of Harry’s racketeering. It is a terrible sight, and yet, if Harry hadn’t been selling the penicillin, probably somebody else would have, and the film makes clear at the beginning that everything was up for sale, if people could afford the price. Harry isn’t the villain of the piece; more a piece of the postwar jigsaw at its most horrific. Anna might not romanticise Harry, but she appears instead to see him as someone who finds himself on the wrong side of history when circumstances become desperate. The chancer who at school knew how to fake his temperature to get out of an exam becomes the man in Vienna who dilutes the drugs that will destroy children’s lives.
It is here that we can understand the film’s form and feeling, the need to work with actual locations and in setting the project in the immediate post-war years. We could call Anna’s state throughout the film as one of ‘rubble-feeling, a sense of personal catastrophe meeting social despair, in a city where the sort of normal emotions Holly assumes don’t quite have the same validity. Thus, the director films post-war Vienna with a constant alertness to location, and it is understandable that when the British Film Institute details the ten best films set in the city, The Third Man is the first film addressed. Charles Drazin writes of its scriptwriter, novelist Graham Greene, being shown around the city by Elizabeth Montagu. She says, ‘‘I took him to the ruins, I took him to the places still standing, I took him everywhere you can think of, including the Great Wheel and all that. He became absolutely enamoured of Vienna.’ ‘(Criterion)
Greene was often a writer of ruinous situations if not always ruinous places, even if he often wrote about countries undergoing political transformation: Our Man in Havana, The Young American, The Heart of the Matter, The Honorary Consul. Characters are frequently in crisis and caught in seedy circumstances, and post-war Vienna suited his aesthetic temperament. The place proves a useful objective correlative to a moral qaugmire, and at the same time helps create it. When Anna says she didn’t know whether she was in love with Harry, even if everything she does indicates she was, this isn’t Anna trying to deny her feelings. It is more that she understands they were created at a particular time, in a particular environment. This wasn’t a transcendent love (whatever that might be, though Holly might well believe in it), but an imminent one, a love where so cynical a character like Harry can seem loveable, and in his way actually happened to be. Out of this type of situational love, an idealist like Holly can appear naive, smug and callow, and thus deserves to be ignored less for killing Anna’s lover than for killing his best friend for some perceived higher purpose.
This isn’t to propose that Holly is wrong and Anna is right. Harry Lime has been a menace, someone whose criminality has been the opposite of a victimless crime. But he understood Anna’s desperation much better than Holly, whose soft glances and tepid gestures would seem contemptible to a woman who understands that morality is a luxury many in the immediate post-war years couldn’t afford. Harry might not have been one of those who were desperate, but he could understand the lower depths more easily than the higher virtues, and would seem to have offered Anna a realistic life and not merely a better one. If many films in Europe after the war explored the architectural destruction in the strewn rubble, some also examined rubble-feeling. These are emotions that would appear in an environment which might seem inexplicable to those occupying a safer, cosier place. Anna would be one such character and can be better understood, probably, through reading ‚ Trümmerliterature’ writers like Wolfgang Borchert and Gunter Grass, than a noir prism that would propose her as potentially a femme fatale. That she is an enigmatic figure to Holly shouldn’t blind us to the fact that she needn’t be one to the viewer, if we read in her this rubble-feeling, and the trauma many felt coming out of the war.
The film is a great example of style as it takes a very different aesthetic approach to the image than the neo-realist films we initially invoked, but it does so all the better to capture a moral fragility that such an environment might engender: that amongs the rubble, people had to find a way to get by, and this wasn’t always going to be honest and decent. Holly might be the film’s characterisational centre, but from another perspective, he can appear very peripheral indeed as the film reflects less his indignant certitude than the city’s ethical chaos. It is one where, if the world hasn’t quite been turned upside down, it needs to be looked at from the most canted of perspectives.
 

© Tony McKibbin