#30: The Third Man

The Third Man (Reed, 1949)

Writing about this movie, the first thing that comes to mind is the beautiful scenery. The film was shot in postwar Vienna when the city was in the process of rebuilding, and the city was splintered into four racial groups which all spoke different languages. A character is running through an orderly city block, and the next shot slinking down a destroyed staircase. The cinematography is absolutely perfect. Shots are from a distance or slightly off-kilter to precisely express the emotional feel of the scene. The visual aspect of the movie is just plain incredible.

The plot is a mixed bag. I like the way it satirizes the noir genre. The main character is an American writer of crime novels who comes to Vienna looking for his friend Harry Lyme, only to discover his friend is dead. He decides then to prove his friend's death wasn't an accident. He immediately accuses the cops of corruption and starts accusing everybody directly of conspiracy. In his hilariously hapless attempts to play private eye, he makes just enough connections to keep him convinced his friend was murdered. Without giving away anything, it turns out the cliches of his novels don't hold true, and there is a clear cut good and a clear cut evil.

Therein lies the problem with the movie. Good and evil are so clear cut that when they pose it like a serious ethical debate, the bad guys just sound ridiculous. 'Oh, you can't tell me if I gave you twenty thousand dollars for every random person who dies you'd seriously have a problem. They're happier dead.' Orson Welles characters often come off as straw men. They take a real life ethical debate and present one side in a blatantly villainesque way. Yes, if a person is selling diluted penicillin to babies with meningitis, then the cops are obviously right to persecute him. But that doesn't apply quite so easily to lesser offenses or any real life controversies, and the cops shouldn't have had to go out of their way to convince the writer how bad the bad guy was. The movie would have been better if it had stayed the anti-noir noir film it seemed like for the first hour.

Rating: **** / 5

33/101

Current movies:

Greenberg: **** / 5

Greenberg is a movie that, for me, hits a little uncomfortably close to home. Or at least, 'When I was in high school/college' home. If I had stayed that way until I was 40. It's a character-driven movie about the hypocrisy of counter-culture. Ben Stiller's character refuses to do anything that doesn't fit into his idea of what's cool, and in his attempts to be a hipster just ends up being a jerk to people. My only criticism of the movie is that it's a little too long for it's content.