Graham Greene’s story in The Third Man does a fantastic job of subverting storytelling expectations, and while there are several ways to examine how the film does that, the story functions as an anti-Western. I don’t mean its a searing political critique of the West, but rather a film deliberately constructed as the antithesis of a Western. This is not the same as a Revisionist Western, which seeks to modify or subvert the genre, it’s a complete overthrowing of genre, and, by extension, the American Myth.
Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) is a two-bit writer of Western novels. He comes to Vienna from his home in American to start a new life with his friend Harry Lime. But when he arrives he discovers Lime died in an accident. Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), a solider keeping law in the British sector of Vienna, tells Martins that Lime was wrapped up in a bad racket, but Martins doesn’t buy it, nor does he buy that Lime’s death is an accident.
As the film proceeds, Martins acts like one of the gunslingers in his novels. He presses issues, walks about as if he is larger than life and doesn’t take no for an answer. But with Joseph Cotton in the role, the performance is almost comedic. He’s a scrawny novelist whose idealism and penchant for seeing the world through simplistic stories leads him into a dangerous game.
Lime acts as if he’s the one bit of order in a city of lawlessness. Instead of recognizing Vienna as a city that has been civilized for longer than his own America has been a nation, he treats it like one of his frontiers. He pins Calloway as the corrupt sheriff, the officers as a game, and Harry Lime as some victim in a place where he hopes to bring some justice and law.
But then the truth comes. Calloway finally grabs Holly and shows him the irrefutable proof that Harry Lime is involved in stealing, diluting and selling penicillin, leading to the deaths of countless lives. That night, Holly spots Harry Lime (as played by Orson Welles) alive and well. This leads to the film’s famous scene where Holly and Harry ride up into a Ferris wheel and Welles asks Harry how much money could he live with if one of those people below, simply dots, stopped moving.
Unlike the Western, Harry Lime isn’t killing people with the bullet and the blade, but from afar. It’s impersonal, impassionate and all about cold hard cash. This is not to say the villains of Westerns aren’t motivated by similar ideas, but the villain of The Third Man is not a wild man of passion, uncivilized and out of control, but a well-bred, well-educated man whose schemes have been rationalized and intellectualized. This leads to his little spiel after the Ferris wheel ride where he talks about how civilization only progresses through adversity. It seems he’s losing no sleep over being that adversity.
Holly eventually decides to help Calloway get Lime. The trap leads to a chase through the sewers and eventually a wounded, corned Lime faces Holly at gunpoint. Lime prompts Holly to shoot him. Holly does the deed, killing the man he was sure was a victim only hours ago. And while this moment does have some semblance of the good triumphing over evil, it is without a taste of triumph or victory to it.
Holly shoots his wounded friend. It’s not a fair fight. One could argue that it’s murder. At the best, it can be seen as a mercy killing. Harry Lime deserves to die, but in the Western there is still a code about how the hero must triumph over the villain. No true Western hero would kill a man wounded, crumpled and cornered.
The Third Man can be seen as cautionary tale, one that warns against the follies of the ideology of the Western. Killing is not heroic, sometimes the bad guys are the civilized men, not the uncivilized animals of the Western. The rest of the world is not America’s Wild West. Western expansion is gone, the world that witnessed World War II is a world where civilizations threaten to destroy each other, not where the civilized must tame the uncivilized.
One thought on “The Second Criterion: ‘The Third Man’”
Good piece, James. I’m surprised when viewers who check out The Third Man now are often disappointed, and I think it’s because of the way it sidesteps your expectations. This is especially true with the ending, which feels hollow yet is just the right way to close out this story. It’s a brilliant film that deserves credit for the way it avoids the standards of its genre.