Second #4650, 77:30, Image © Studio Canal

Although Harry Lime has, as Jeremy pointed out on Tuesday, already made several fleeting appearances in The Third Man, today’s still is the first time we see him as a flesh-and-blood human being, awkwardly posed mid-sentence, interacting with Holly Martins in a more-than-spectral manner for the first time. Of course, this is also the first scene in which we hear Orson Welles’ mellifluous speaking voice: the actor may not have had “a face for radio,” but he certainly had a voice for it.

As the two former friends properly reunite for the first time, the Prater amusement park seems abandoned: not a soul can be seen as Harry boldly strides up to Holly, outstretching his arm for a handshake and bellowing an overly enthusiastic, “Hello old man!” Holly’s refusal to hold out his hand in return must surely clue Harry in to his friend’s perturbed state of mind. It is also at this point that a throng of Viennese people start coming out of the woodwork, as it were, bustling past Harry and Holly and boarding the carousel behind them. The sudden appearance of everyday civilians (including a mother and her bundled-up children) in this otherwise ghostly amusement park—in other words, of some semblance of normalcy—is unexpected, even surreal; the movie’s sudden leap from eerie desolation to bustling activity reverses Harry Lime’s own “transformation” from idolized, dead-and-buried old pal to revived, reviled criminal racketeer (from life to death and back again). The absence of any human figures in the frame while Holly waits anxiously for Harry is also simply Directing 101: create tension by removing all relatable characters from the frame (with only dilapidated theme-park rides and structures in the background), then throw in a bustle of activity when the scene’s Mystery Guest finally arrives. Decades later, Paul Thomas Anderson used a similar technique for Barry and Lena’s euphoric Hawaiian reunion in Punch-Drunk Love—though in that case, the sudden leap from emptiness to overactivity of course serves a completely different purpose.

http://youtu.be/qVLWYckzw5s

In any case, the sudden arrival of bystanders within earshot forces Harry and Holly to duck into one of the Ferris Wheel’s cars, just as the apparently dormant ride lurches back to life. This transition results in one of The Third Man‘s most abstract, geometric intercuts: Robert Krasker’s camera views the Ferris Wheel from below in a maze-like composition of stark diagonals and rigid squares-within-squares.

A near-abstract worm’s-eye view of the Riesenrad Ferris Wheel, which currently holds Holly Martins and Harry Lime. Image © Studio Canal.

If The Third Man repeatedly disorients the viewer by turning Vienna’s urban topography into a distorted amalgam of lines and shapes, this shot does the same with the Ferris Wheel, turning a site of leisure and innocence into something unsettling and unfamiliar. We could even call the shot symbolic: if Holly and Harry are both “trapped” in a postwar world of outmoded moralism and barbaric avarice, that inescapability is reinforced by this shot, which creates a vortex from which neither character can seemingly break free. The fact that this amusement-park ride is no longer a sign of carefree innocence is even recognized by Harry, who tells Holly that “kids used to ride this thing a lot in the old days, but they haven’t the money now, poor devils.”

This happens as Harry gives a generous tip to an obviously grateful ride attendant, a seemingly throwaway gesture which begs a number of questions. If Harry deprives Vienna of its penicillin in an abhorrent ploy for money, does he think he’s “giving back to the community” by recognizing its poverty and empathizing with its lower classes? Was he really under the impression that he was hurting nobody with his black-market scam? Or did he think that the resultant deaths and mental breakdowns caused by his racket were simply part of the process, unfortunate casualties of a capitalistic system that prioritizes self-preservation and economic gain above all else? Some of these questions may be partly answered by the ensuing dialogue scenes (which we’ll tackle next week—including one that gives our Still Dots series its name), but it’s impossible to ignore the hypocrisy suggested by Harry’s gesture: he’s kind to individuals with whom he’s in close contact but indifferent to humanity as a whole, which again may simply be a symptom of living in a world that’s taken global war to be the natural way of functioning.

Still Dots 76 comes in the midst of a heated exchange about none other than Anna Schmidt: after Harry complains about his infernal indigestion (a malady which brings to mind Popescu’s assertion that drinking alcohol “makes [him] acid”—maybe it’s guilt or some kind of decay of the soul causing their heartburn), Holly notifies him that “his girl” has been handed over to the Russians for her passport inconsistencies. Maybe Holly is testing Harry, seeing if this news causes any remorse or sadness in his seemingly emotionless friend. If this is the case, Harry fails the test: “What can I do, old man?!,” he says smarmily. “I’m dead, aren’t I?” We’ve heard tales of Harry’s charm before, which is in full effect in this scene; but maybe we’ve been holding out hope that he’s misunderstood or at least cognizant of his own villainy, that he’s somehow affected by the crimes he’s committed. What’s striking in this scene is how self-obsessed and callous Harry is even as he lays on the charm: one wonders if he’s undergone a bleak transformation since he and Holly were such good friends.

Indeed, whatever friendship they used to have seems to be quickly crumbling away, not only because of Holly’s revulsion towards Harry’s crimes but because Harry is obviously suspicious of Holly’s iron-clad sense of justice and morality. Holly is understandably outraged at Harry’s indifference towards Anna; he thinks Harry should give himself up or at least call upon one of his contacts in the military police. Harry responds incredulously: ”What, do you expect me to give myself up? ‘It’s a far, far better thing that I do…’? The old limelight, the fall of the curtain? Oh, Holly, you and I aren’t heroes, the world doesn’t make any heroes outside of your stories.” (It’s at this point that his indigestion acts up again.) There’s a lot going on in this exchange, obviously: in addition to Harry’s punning reference to his own last name and his A Tale of Two Cities reference, he’s practically summing up many of the themes that Jeremy and I have hypothesized since the start of Still Dots. Central here is the idea that heroism and right-and-wrong morality don’t exist anymore in the modern world, that they’re outdated myths from old Westerns and folktales from pre-industrial societies. (The most film noir element in The Third Man, aside from its shadowy lighting, might be this thematic interest in the blurring of black-and-white notions of good and evil.) Maybe Harry is simply trying to rationalize his own behavior, but he might be right that the sacrificial heroism of Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities is impossible today; indeed, it’s perversely antithetical to the whole system of industrial capitalism. In Dickens’ book, the entrenchment of this all-powerful economic system hadn’t yet taken place, but the tyrants whom the French Revolution was meant to overthrow may have been its forebears. As the Marquis St. Evrémonde says in A Tale of Two Cities, “Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear and slavery…will keep the dogs obedient to the whip, as long as this roof…shuts out the sky.” Perhaps it is this deference of fear and slavery, made even more powerful given the meteoric rise of industrial capitalism in the late 19th century, that is motivating Harry Lime, causing him to protect himself monetarily at all costs. We’ll discover next week just how fully this inhumane mindset has infested Mr. Lime.

Obviously this is a thematically and visually dense 62 seconds; indeed, this whole scene will provide plenty of meat to pick apart in the near future. It may or may not provide the key to decoding Harry Lime’s ambiguous behavior; at the very least, it strongly conveys his paradoxical charming-yet-unsettling demeanor. In any case, The Third Man‘s deft blending of emotional resonance, thematic complexity, visual innovation, and big-budget entertainment brings to mind another classic about the damning repercussions of greed and alienation: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), directed by John Huston and based on B. Traven’s 1927 novel. One of the first Hollywood films to be filmed almost entirely on location (in Mexico), which already raises comparison to The Third Man‘s location shooting in Vienna, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre also made the point that a false and manmade cycle of greed and self-preservation sets a disastrous precedent for violent inhumanity. As the doomed Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) ponders in the clip below, money may in fact be the root of all evil, the very idea of which torments human individuals in modern capitalism; or, on the other hand, money can destroy or rescue individuals, depending on their inherent goodness, their own self-forged ethical code. If the latter interpretation is true, then something must have been severely unbalanced in the charismatic, larger-than-life Harry Lime, even from the start.

Over the absolute length of one year — two times per week — Still Dots will grab a frame every 62 seconds of Carol Reed’s The Third Man. This project will run until December 2012, when we finish at second 6324. For a complete archive of the project, click here. For an introduction to the project, click here.

Second #4524, 75:26, Image © Studio Canal

This is our third glimpse of Harry Lime, aside from his shoes and his shadow, and it is certainly a glimpse and no more. (In case you don’t remember, here is his first appearance and his second.) His figure is the one half-hidden behind a pole from the carousel, the same carousel he will disappear behind after this meeting with Holly.

Holly has chosen this abandoned fairground as a meeting place, a curious choice since his intent is to choose somewhere “open” for his own safety. Still, perhaps the vast expanse of unattended children’s rides and grounds might offer at least somewhere to run should trouble strike. But abandoned fairgrounds, circuses and amusement parks have not traditionally fared very well for those not interested in their own safety. To add to Matt’s post last week, which featured such gems as Strangers on a Train and The Living Daylights, we have seen abandoned fairgrounds as sites of horror across media since the twenties. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), in which a sideshow somnambulist stalks the streets at night committing horrible murders, may be the first cinematic connection drawn between the wholesome fun of the circus and the horror of death, but this connection by no means stopped there.

The poster for Tod Browning’s “Freaks” (1932)

Maybe the first example of horror at the fair itself came in 1932 with Tod Browning’s follow up to his much-acclaimed adaptation of Dracula with Bela Lugosi. Riding the popularity wave he achieved with Dracula , Browning turned to something from misspent youth–Browning grew up in a well-to-do family but was so obsessed with the circus life that at the age of sixteen he literally ran away and joined the circus. Touring with Oofty Goofty (AKA the Wild Man of Borneo) and Ringling Bros Circus, Browning lived out that quintessential 1900′s boyhood dream of running away to the circus, and Freaks is the film borne out of that experience. Freaks, notable as a film casting “real” circus freaks, was essentially an early noir film, focusing on a pair of conniving non-freak performers who plan to murder Hans, a trusting midget with a large inheritance to his name. The plot is very reminiscent of Double Indemnity (widely hailed as the first noir film) though Freaks hit the screens 12 years earlier. Cinematic forays into the horrible world of fairgrounds and circuses don’t end there either. For instance, take a look at this scene from The Lady from Shanghai, a film directed, and produced by Orson Welles and starring himself and Rita Hayworth, that came out two years before The Third Man. Welles plays a patsy, who in this climactic (and surreal) scene follows the group that set him up into a house of mirrors:

In the literary world, murder and horror at the circus took its hold in the twenties as well. Freaks itself was based on a 1926 short story, Spurs by Tod Robbins, but the circus as a setting also made it into my favorite Sherlock Holmes story, The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger published in 1927. The Veiled Lodger is notable as one of the few times that Sherlock Holmes failed to put the story together, but it tells the story (again) of attempted murder at the circus. Plans for murder, as always, seem foolproof but everything goes awry when the conspirators are mauled by a lion killing one and disfiguring the other, who now wears a veil. Even up into the 1940′s, a few years before The Third Man, terrifying things were happening at literary circuses. William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 tale of greed and corruption at the circus, Nightmare Alley tells the tale of–as the back cover describes it–”a young man who bludgeons his way to success by betraying two women who love him, by stealing a fortune from the gullible and weak-minded, by seducing the innocent into degeneracy and corruption.” Not exactly horror, but carousels even make an uncanny appearance in American Gods, the literary breakthrough for upper Midwest literary hero, Neil Gaiman. In Gaiman’s tale of old-world religions in America, a vast pantheon of Gods from cultures spanning the globe meet up at Spring Green Wisconsin’s House on the Rock where they all take a ride on the world’s largest carousel, which becomes a portal into another world.

And all this is to leave out one of the most terrifying characters and moments borne of the carnival, made all too real by this July’s shooting. The Joker has been the prime villain for Batman since Batman #1 in 1940, and whatever his portrayal, in classic comics or contemporary, films, television, or even his appearance on Scooby Doo, the Joker has injected terror into the fairground. Constantly in and out of mental institutions, the Joker is always obtaining abandoned fairgrounds in the Gotham metro area only to use them as traps for Batman, Robin, and other heroic Gothamites. Take for instance, 1988′s Batman: The Killing Joke, arguably the best batman comic ever written, in which the Joker kidnaps police commissioner Jim Gordon and tries to drive him insane in an abandoned carnival. Between the Joker, Steven King’s 1986 novel It, and the real-world corollary of John Wayne Gacy Jr., clowns have become something to terrify countless children and adults alike.

A panel from Alan Moore’s “The Killing Joke” (1988) in which The Joker tries to turn Gotham’s sanest man insane. The comic was drawn by the great Brian Bolland of Judge Dredd fame.

With all this said, it seems a curious choice for Holly to pick an abandoned fairground as a safe haven. Nonetheless, that is where we find our stalwart hero today. Perhaps this seemingly unanticipated decision has something to do with Holly’s mental state. Holly is, remember, meeting with a friend he thought long dead, a ghost returning from his childhood to haunt Vienna’s own haunted amusement park. Though Holly has seen Harry alive and well once since his funeral, it was in a drunken, otherworldly state, and though he knows intellectually that his friend is alive and that another corpse was buried in his place, he seems to be in a bemused state of disbelief. While the notion that Harry is still alive knocked Anna off her mental feet, Holly seems to have just lost his wits, wandering into this dangerous fairground with a known killer, why? Because emotionally, Holly doesn’t believe, yet, that Harry is alive. That is, until today’s frame, when he comes sauntering up plain as day only to greet him with an annoyingly comfortable “Hello old man, how are you?”

I’ve been trying to imagine other moments in other stories in which some character exhibits the crippling mind state Holly must be in entering into this frame, and the best example I can think of comes from James Thurber’s poetic fantastic story, The Thirteen Clocks. Truth be told, I have probably heard/read The Thirteen Clocks more than any other book. Growing up my family had a cassette of the story being read out loud, which we listened to on every drive more than about thirty minutes, and its myriad charms have stayed with me to this day. This particular moment comes when the cruel, wicked, yet surprisingly foppish Duke and his chief spy, Hark, a straight man, the Abbott to his Costello, sit waiting for our unlikely heroes (the Golux and the Prince) to arrive. If you haven’t read this story, you really should.

A purple ball with gold stars on it came slowly bouncing down the iron stairs and winked and twinkled, like a naked child saluting priests.

“What insolence is this?” the Duke demanded. “What is that thing?”

“A ball,” said Hark.

“I know that!” screamed the Duke. “But why? What does its ghastly presence signify?”

“It looks to me,” said Hark, “very like a ball the Golux and those children used to play with.”

“They’re on his side!” The Duke was apoplectic. “Their ghosts are on his side.”

“He has a lot of friends,” said Hark.

“Silence!” roared the Duke. “He knows not what is dead from what is dying, or where he’s
been from where he’s going, or striking clocks from clocks that never strike.”

“What makes me think he does?” The spy stopped chewing. Something very much like nothing
anyone had seen before came trotting down the stairs and crossed the room.

“What is that?” the Duke asked, palely.

“I don’t know what it is,” said Hark, “but it’s the only one there ever was. (James Thurber, The Thirteen Clocks, Simon and Schuster, 1950, pgs. 95-97).

Marc Simont’s illustration that accompanies this passage in the original publication of The Thirteen Clocks. Thurber was almost completely blind by the time the book went to press, but he approved of the illustrations when Simont was unable to describe some of his drawings in words.

The Duke and Hark return to their plotting after this moment, but despite my hundreds of times reading this story I’ve never really been able to understand this moment. What is that thing, that “something very much like nothing anyone had ever seen before?” Neil Gaiman, who we talked about above, called this story “a miracle. I think you could learn everything you need to know about telling stories from this book.” But despite enough re-readings that I can recite most of this book by heart, this moment, which is, to borrow a term from screenplays, a “beat” in the otherwise leapfrogging narrative, is still too unknowable to have any real significance. This thing that passes before the Duke and Hark is the uncanny, it is that thing which cannot be. It’s trot through the room leaves Holly feeling the way the Duke does, though his straight man is the stiff and proper Calloway, and his “something” is the fact that Harry is alive. Unlike the Duke, though, Holly doesn’t carry on with his business, he goes after that unknowable something, and today’s frame finds that something walking around a carousel straight toward him.

Over the absolute length of one year — two times per week — Still Dots will grab a frame every 62 seconds of Carol Reed’s The Third Man. This project will run until December 2012, when we finish at second 6324. For a complete archive of the project, click here. For an introduction to the project, click here.

Second #4526, 75:26, Image © Studio Canal

Holly has turned up at Baron Kurtz’s apartment, only to find that the shady Baron (slash-violinist at the Casanova Club) is joined by Dr. Winkel, the man whose name Holly could never pronounce. (After all, Holly’s only finally stopped calling Calloway “Callahan”; we shouldn’t expect him to start saying Vink-el any time soon.) Actually, Holly’s not looking for Kurtz or Winkel: he’s calling out Harry Lime, the elusive Third Man, wisely opting to remain outside rather than accept Kurtz’s suspicious invitation upstairs. “Tell him I’ll wait by that big wheel there,” Holly says, full of petulant bluster, gesturing towards the immense Ferris Wheel behind him.

The “big wheel” behind Holly is actually the Wiener Riesenrad, a 212-foot tall Ferris Wheel at the entrance of the Prater amusement park in Leopoldstadt, a district of Vienna. The Riesenrad has become one of the city’s most popular tourist attractions, thanks partially to The Third Man itself. Originally built in 1897 to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of Emperor Franz Josef I, the Riesenrad was scarred by the violence of World War II like much of Vienna around it: the ride was rebuilt after undergoing severe damage during the war, and its second incarnation had only half of the gondolas that the original creation did. After demarcating European exoticism in The Third Man as well as Max Ophüls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman, made a year earlier in 1948, the Riesenrad would reappear as a signpost for Vienna in later films such as Scorpio (1973), Before Sunset (1995), and The Living Daylights (1987), one of two Bond movies featuring Timothy Dalton. Dalton and Maryam d’Abo’s scenes aboard the Riesenrad in that movie, though, are about as far as possible from the Welles-Cotten scenes aboard the Ferris Wheel in The Third Man, as we’ll see next week. A towering structure driven by an endless cycle of revolution and repetition, the Riesenrad as a machine offers a succinct visual symbol for The Third Man‘s themes of inverted moral codes and an ongoing cycle of violence and symptomatic apathy. It’s cliched to say that a movie or a character arc resembles a roller coaster, but the metaphor is apt for Holly, whose last several days in Vienna have surely turned his world upside-down.

A recent digital reproduction of Vienna’s Wiener Riesenrad. Image © Fargo Levy.

It shouldn’t come as a great surprise that the view of Vienna offered to us in this scene is a bleak, desolate one. Of course there’s the background of Still Dots 74 itself, what with the skeletal, bare trees clawing their way towards the sky throughout the frame and the surreal absence of any kind of structure (residential or commercial) in the distance. Maybe more importantly, though, there’s also a preceding shot as Holly approaches Kurtz’s pockmarked apartment building in which a number of construction workers can be seen toiling away on a vast pile of rubble. An image that must have been depressingly familiar in postwar Vienna, this scene’s location shooting makes brilliant use of Vienna’s real-world traumas: the visible injuries undergone by the city act as outward manifestations of the psychological turmoil currently raging in both Harry Lime and Holly Martins.

Austrian citizens walking through occupied Vienna in March 1945.

We might say that Still Dots 74 exists on a fulcrum: we’re teetering on a turning point in The Third Man, a movie which might be bisected into “pre-Harry Lime” and “post-Harry Lime.” A less sophisticated modern movie might put its big twist at the end, drumming up anticipation by letting viewers guess what the climactic surprise might be, but that plot structure would allow no time for rumination about what it means that Harry Lime is still alive. The Third Man, however, resurrects Lime with a dense half hour left in the movie; rather than a mere marketable plot twist, this grand reveal also complicates and subverts the emotional connections and thematic concepts the movie has conveyed thus far. While Anna is discombobulated by the news that her lover is still alive – all other news (including the fact that Joseph Harbin’s corpse was in Harry’s coffin) dwarfs in comparison, meaning nothing to her – Holly has become outraged by his former friend’s subterfuge. After Holly tells Kurtz that he wants to speak with Harry, the Baron responds with faux incredulity: “Are you mad?” “Alright, I’m mad,” Holly responds. “I’ve seen a ghost. You tell Harry I want to see him!” Holly’s wording is more apt than he might realize: now able to play the spurned best friend betrayed by the man he thought he knew best, Holly’s solo investigation has taken on even greater emotional heft. As we’ll see over the next couple of weeks, Harry will drive an ideological as well as an emotional wedge into Holly’s preconceptions: if Martins’ moral code is still (temporarily) rigid despite the revelations he’s been faced with, that moral code will soon be endangered by Harry’s existentialism-infused explanations for his own behavior.

Ferris wheels, like any amusement park ride, are usually associated with leisure and youthful innocence, yet we can tell from today’s still that the Riesenrad serves a different purpose here. Just as the Ferris wheel in Still Dots 74 is foregrounded against a blanket of gray, depressingly vacant except for Holly and the frail trees that surround it, this tourist attraction will also become the site for tense, unsettling debates regarding morality, corruption, war, and human cruelty. Perhaps the cataclysmic fallout of World War II has been so pervasive that it even infects amusement parks and playgrounds – former sites of innocence and joy. But The Third Man is hardly the only movie to juxtapose the carefree allure of amusement park rides with a jarring depiction of violence and moral weakness. Two years later, for example, the Master of Suspense himself would utilize a breakneck carousel during the climax of Strangers on a Train (1951). Whether or not he was directly influenced by the towering Riesenrad in The Third Man, Hitchcock’s use of the carousel (itself echoed in the opening of John Woo’s Face/Off) similarly takes a symbol of youthful vitality and subverts it to demonstrate human corruptibility run amok. Even more disheartening: the cyclical nature of both carousels and Ferris wheels suggest that, even after the crimes of Harry Lime and Strangers on a Train‘s Bruno Anthony have been persecuted, the machine-like pattern of violence, greed, and corruption will repeat itself, albeit in updated forms. Marx’s dialectical materialism teaches us the same thing: despite the cause-and-effect patterns that humans may set in motion, history will repeat itself as general patterns of human behavior predominate. It’s history as a Ferris wheel, in other words, and as we’ll discover next week, from the vantage point of one of the Riesenrad’s gondolas, human behavior takes on a decidedly skewed and discomforting appearance.

Over the absolute length of one year — two times per week — Still Dots will grab a frame every 62 seconds of Carol Reed’s The Third Man. This project will run until December 2012, when we finish at second 6324. For a complete archive of the project, click here. For an introduction to the project, click here.

Second #4464, 74:24, Image © Studio Canal

We find Anna, again, in the clutches of the British military’s investigations, though this time she has been pulled in as a potential witness. Calloway begins his interrogation with a characteristically brusque interruption, “Now then, Miss Schmidt, I’m not interested in your forged papers – that’s purely a Russian case. When did you last see Lime?” With this vaguest hint of absolution with regards to her phony papers, an unsaid “help us and we can help you,” Calloway is trying to draw something useful about Harry from her, assuming that this man must still be communicating with his former paramour. But Anna is looking out from a different world. Her glazed eyes and ignorant expression, and the fact that she keeps muttering things like, “I’m sorry – I don’t seem able to understand anything you say,” tells us, even if Calloway is still oblivious, that she is telling the truth.

Harry, a man who Calloway considers to be supremely reprehensible, “the worst racketeer that ever made a dirty living in this city,” has not even contacted Anna to tell her that he is still alive. He has allowed her to live in grief, digging through his apartment for photos, wearing his monogrammed pajamas and generally sinking into a grief-fueled depression. While Holly has already been convinced of the darkness in Harry’s character, through a montage-load of evidenciary files, his own devaluing of his friend’s character has been based on a moral system set in law, namely good people don’t racketeer nor do they fake their own death, a truth that is less true if only that it is based on a man-made social structure rather than an emotional truth. This moment, however, sheds a shadowy coloring to Harry’s persona in a purely emotional way, with Anna’s glassy expression reflecting back Harry’s selfishness. Indeed, what kind of person, no matter their perspective on the law, puts someone they love through that kind of pain? How could Harry let Anna suffer, thinking that he is dead?

If Anna has ever had doubts about Harry’s inherent goodness, now is the moment they would grow to fruition. But Anna is so blindsided by this assertion that she completely shuts down. While she certainly had doubts about the official story being put out by the police inquest (she told Holly “I know. I wondered about it a hundred times, if it really was an accident,” and even “He’s better dead. I knew he was mixed up, but…not like that.”), she is so flabbergasted that the idea that Harry might still be alive must have never crossed her mind. That Harry could be alive and be so callous as to let her mourn him must never have crossed her mind, and as her brain reprograms itself to allow these new facts to exist, nothing else matters, not even her pending deportation to the Russian sector.

Anna’s repeated mutterings are symptoms of her difficulty parsing the facts that have just come to light. The idea that Harry is alive just cannot make sense in her mental schema, and her disconnect from reality is due to the mental reprogramming necessary for this to “compute.” But unlike Robot B-9 (above) or HAL 9000 (below) Anna doesn’t have the mental acuity of a machine. Her sense of self and sense of purpose is not mechanically fixed, and when faced with an unacceptable truth, her elastic mind can change to accommodate that truth. Either that, or as our dear friend Freud would imagine, she might repress that unthinkable thought, and give herself some variety of neurosis.

Whichever way she chooses to deal with this problem, we won’t know yet, since after this frame we won’t see Anna for another month (her next appearance is in Still Dots #84, on September 20th) but we can understand her last word, the one that closes the scene, as a psychoanalytic response to this fact that she has learned about Harry. As she leaves this room full of hapless interrogators, Anna turns to Calloway, seemingly pulling herself together, and says “Poor Harry, I wish he was dead, he would be safe from all of you then.” Any psychoanalyst worth their salt would undoubtedly have more to say about this comment, but to my untrained mind, Anna is telling a truth through her sarcastic outburst. What she really means, barely hidden in the phrasing, is “I wish he was dead, I would be safe from what it means that he is alive.”

Over the absolute length of one year — two times per week — Still Dots will grab a frame every 62 seconds of Carol Reed’s The Third Man. This project will run until December 2012, when we finish at second 6324. For a complete archive of the project, click here. For an introduction to the project, click here.

Second #4402, 73:22, Image © Studio Canal

At military headquarters, Anna is being ushered up a desolate staircase by a throng of officers as Holly spots her approaching. Anxiously, he tries to break through their protective entourage in order to divulge what she still does not know: Harry Lime is alive. “I’ve just seen a dead man walking!,” Holly says to her incredulously. “I saw him buried, and now I’ve seen him alive!” The uncanny thus raises its monstrous head again, though Holly is aware that there’s no black magic going on here: the corpse inside of Harry’s coffin is actually that of Joseph Harbin, the hospital employee who supplied Harry and his gang with their black-market penicillin. It is at this point that Major Calloway—a character positioned somewhere between grizzled empathy and callous bureaucracy, whom both Holly and the audience still can’t make up their minds about—emerges from his office. Disinterested in Anna’s forged passport, Calloway pulls Anna aside to grill her about Harry Lime’s whereabouts (a poignant interrogation we’ll save for next week).

As a character, Calloway seems at first glance like little more than a narrative cog in the machine: a foil to Holly’s lone investigator, a device to provide information and push the story along. As played by Trevor Howard, though, Calloway comes off as something a little more than this (especially later in the film). A British major stationed in Vienna in 1949, Calloway must certainly have seen action during the war; as such, his stony, world-weary demeanor may be a result of his presumably sobering military stint. For most of the first part of the film, Calloway is too busy deflecting Holly’s petulant criticisms to show much of a human side; but it may be the scene in which he proves Harry’s guilt to Holly (utilizing a wealth of filmstrips, photographs, fingerprints, handwriting samples, and so on) that we get a fleeting yet revealing glimpse of Calloway’s empathy. True, at first Calloway’s buddy-buddy friendliness seems like a ploy to get Holly on his side: he flatters Holly by mentioning his book The Lone Rider of Santa Fe immediately after revealing that Harry is actually a murderer. Yet after Calloway’s parade of evidence, before Holly returns to his hotel for what he presumes to be his last night in Vienna, Calloway offers a surprisingly heartfelt “I’m sorry, Martins.” It is also immediately after Holly’s departure that the Russian MP enters Calloway’s office regarding Anna’s forged passport; Calloway responds with a disheartened, “We’re not really going to pick her up for that, are we?” The Russian officer responds by saying, “What can we do? We have our instructions,” which is echoed by the British officer who tells Anna, right before she’s escorted to military HQ, “Sorry, miss, it’s orders. We can’t go against the protocol.” This “I was only following orders!” mea culpa offers an indirect connection to wartime atrocities, what with the common excuse that German soldiers were only obeying Hitler’s orders. War is thus seen as a bureaucratic system in itself, run not unlike a modern business in which the obedience of subservients is necessary for the enterprise to function.

Trevor Howard

We’ve briefly discussed the star personae and extracinematic public image of Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, and Alida Valli; it might be time we do so for Trevor Howard as well. One of the most well-known actors in British postwar film, Howard actually got his start on the stage at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art; he even turned down a contract offered by Paramount in 1935, choosing to work on the stage rather than in film (at least initially). After volunteering for (but being turned down by) both the Royal Air Force and the British Army after the start of the war, Howard was called up to the airborne division of the Royal Corps of Signals in 1940; he fought in the Allied invasion of Sicily and parachuted into Nazi-occupied Norway. Stories of Howard’s wartime courage were distributed widely in the press following the start of his film career, but many of these tales were revealed to be fabrications by publicists and studios. (In actuality, Howard was eventually discharged from the army for mental instability and a purportedly “psychopathic personality.”)

Howard began dabbling in film after the war, at which time a role in 1945′s The Way to the Stars led to his breakout performance in David Lean’s Brief Encounter (also 1945). The appeal of international travel nudged him away from theater towards film, and soon came his role as Major Calloway—thus establishing a hard-eged yet shrewd persona for which Howard would soon become semi-typecast. (In the “interesting trivia” category: while shooting The Third Man, Howard, still in his British MP costume, wandered the Russian sector of Vienna and was promptly arrested by Russian soldiers. He was returned to the film’s set as soon as his identity was ascertained.) Throughout his career, Howard worked often with David Lean and stood out in performances (on both stage and screen) ranging from Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew to Ingrid Bergman’s paramour Løvborg in Hedda Gabler to the head of the Kryptonian Council in Superman. From 1947 to 1952 Howard was deemed one of British cinema’s top ten box office draws, a fact which points towards The Third Man‘s big-budget, prestige production status (given Howard’s relatively small role in the film).

For some reason I want to imbue the character of Calloway with a great deal of poignancy and melancholy, perhaps because of Howard’s natural magnetism in the role. If Calloway did experience the traumas of war firsthand (as Howard himself did), how does he feel now, stuck in a postwar Vienna that is still occupied by foreign troops, in which soldiers continue to operate by “only following orders,” in which systematized violence (epitomized by Harry’s black-market criminality) continues after the war, transformed yet unabated? For Calloway, does it simply seem like the cycle of war and inhumanity is repeating itself? Like the soldier Henslowe in John Dos Passos’ novel Three Soldiers, does Calloway think that human existence is defined by “organizations growing and stifling individuals and individuals revolting hopelessly against them, and at last forming new societies to crush the old societies and becoming slaves again in their turn”? Admittedly, there’s little in Howard’s performance to suggest this bleak resignation; Calloway really does seem like a dutiful if world-weary soldier. But I also believe a great deal of sadness can be read in this character’s eyes. Maybe this is why, when he witnesses Holly Martins’ realization that his close friendship with Harry has become frayed by the latter’s inhumane actions, we see Calloway’s heavily-fortified personal armor weaken for the first time, revealing a begrudging empathy for Holly’s sudden reckoning with a cruel, war-ravaged world.

Over the absolute length of one year — two times per week — Still Dots will grab a frame every 62 seconds of Carol Reed’s The Third Man. This project will run until December 2012, when we finish at second 6324. For a complete archive of the project, click here. For an introduction to the project, click here.

Second #4340, 72:20, Image © Studio Canal

In 1939, 10 years before the release of The Third Man and six months before the beginning of the war that would shape its setting,  papers were being signed that would change American cinema forever. Alfred Hitchcock was coming to Hollywood. At the time, his fame in England was frantic (newspapers were calling him “Alfred the Great”) and his international reputation was growing in leaps in bounds. A New York Times feature writer even went so far as to write: “Three unique and valuable institutions the British have that we in America have not. Magna Carta, the Tower Bridge and Alfred Hitchcock.” In 1939, a few years after his 1935 film, The 39 Steps Hitchcock developed a term that will come in useful for looking at today’s frame. In a lecture at Columbia University, Hitchcock explained: “[We] have a name in the studio, and we call it the ‘MacGuffin’. It is the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story. In crook stories it is almost always the necklace and in spy stories it is most always the papers.” While a silly name, this concept has been latched onto by filmmakers ever since, most notably bluckbuster wunderkind, George Lucas who claimed that he thought of R2D2 as the MacGuffin in the Star Wars narrative.

A famoua MacGuffin, in The Maltese Falcon (1941), the eponymous sculpture is the object around which the plot orbits, yet it has no narrative importance of its own. Image © Warner Bros

Today we are in for a close brush with The Third Man‘s own MacGuffin, and since this is a spy story, it takes the form of Anna’s forged papers. As she strides stolidly toward the camera, swinging her right arm into her coat, she is being detained by the Russian police. While this is certainly not an object without narrative importance for Anna, indeed it could mean her deportation or exclusion to the Russian zone of Vienna, but it’s unnecessary position at the center of all of our main characters lives is what makes it the story’s MacGuffin. The papers were forged by Popescu, an event arranged by Harry and for the benefit of Anna, out of love, and as Calloway and the Russians confiscated the papers, against Holly’s protestation, they got into the mix as well. Not only that, but now that  they have been confiscated and Anna detained, putting her life in some jeopardy, these papers will serve as the story’s main conflict as Holly must choose who he wants to protect, his old friend Harry or his new love (and a damsel in distress) Anna. Meanwhile we know nothing of the papers themselves. We have neither seen them, nor heard them described, only the narratives that surround them.

Vince looks at another MacGuffin in Pulp Fiction (1994). The briefcase that he carries the entire film contains some mystical glowing substance that is important to the characters, but which we ourselves never see. Image © Miramax

Up until Still Dots #65 we could also have claimed that Harry Lime is MacGuffin himself, since his figure is one at the center of so much of this film, but his charming smirk takes away all doubt. Harry is a character, one portrayed so much larger than life that we must be careful not to call him a person, and though his figure serves an important narrative function, he worms his way much further into our hearts and minds than any briefcase, statuette or passport could. That charisma is Harry’s own kind of magic, evidenced today in the stern expression on Anna’s face. Anna, who out of her love for him still refuses to doubt his inherent goodness, even in the face of so much evidence, walks toward the police with an expressions that belies little and sends only the message, “I’m not saying a word.” Even after his supposed death, Anna won’t sell out Harry for his involvement in the papers that all parties involved know to be forgeries. So again, the papers find themselves at the center of the narrative, even this love story, one that Holly is eager to forget, between Anna and Harry.

A Vienna passport from 1947, likely very close to Anna’s in appearance, but most passports cannot stir up as much intrigue as Anna’s.

But The Third Man presents no such image. Anna’s papers, for all their importance, are never shown and only discussed. They, like Orson Welles’ face, could be a simulacrum of their own, since they are certainly a copy with no original. But, for all we know, Anna’s papers could be blank, making them a double simulacrum, a fake copy of a fake passport. Even Anna’s name could be a fraud, tied to these falsified papers and her Viennese identity, but not to her heritage or birth name. These papers are the lie that holds this story together, and as the lie is being outed, the divergent plot lines are in danger of coming apart at the seams. So as Anna is taken into custody, not knowing that somewhere, Harry is still alive, and Holly goes looking for Harry, not knowing about Anna’s peril, our plot, powered by this (fake) object, is headed toward climax/disaster.

Over the absolute length of one year — two times per week — Still Dots will grab a frame every 62 seconds of Carol Reed’s The Third Man. This project will run until December 2012, when we finish at second 6324. For a complete archive of the project, click here. For an introduction to the project, click here.

Second #4278, 71:18, Image © Studio Canal

If film images act as the modern world’s hieroglyphics, then Still Dots 70 must clearly be the pictogram for sadness: from Robert Krasker’s silky black lighting to the neglected old-world beauty of Dario Simoni’s set decoration to Alida Valli’s spectral presence as Anna, this shot glimmers softly with heartache. Of course this impression is affirmed by what has come immediately beforehand: Anna lying in bed, silently weeping, her tear-streaked face turning towards us slowly in a devastating close-up. (She doesn’t yet know what Holly has discovered: that her lover is still alive.) And tragically for Anna, her nightmare is about to get worse: at the door is a multinational throng of military policemen, demanding she accompany them to headquarters in order to discuss her forged passport.

In a film known for its canted angles and bold compositions, this shot is striking for its neat, clean vertical lines: the screen could be split up into at least four rectangular zones, from the window at screen left, to Anna’s robed body, to the furnishing currently catching and reflecting a dazzling collection of lights (I would guess the fixture is a stove or heater of some kind), to the pool of blackness swallowing up the right side of the frame. But even when the camera rights itself and eradicates all diagonal lines, the effect is not one of stasis but of claustrophobia: no matter where Anna goes, it seems she’s walking into another cage, an imposing world that won’t allow her to escape her current loneliness and frustration. A picturesque view of nighttime Vienna is visible through her window, but even this external world is “boxed in”: judging from today’s shot, it seems to offer no liberation from Anna’s plight.

Besides its plethora of vertical lines, today’s shot is also striking for its meticulous lighting. We’ve had plenty of gorgeous examples of Krasker’s chiaroscuro lighting setups throughout The Third Man, but today’s example may be the most powerful, if only because of its emotional undercurrents. The abundance of shadows, struck by a few pinpoint dots and narrow swaths of bright light, is familiar to us from postwar films noir, which were known for their increasingly radical use of low-key lighting. What’s significant about the harsh lighting in both The Third Man and films noir is that they’re meant to represent deeper emotional or thematic concepts: although the nebulous shadows certainly contribute to a foreboding atmosphere, they more importantly suggest the violence, cruelty, self-destruction, alienation, moral despair, and/or doomed fates that distinguish such movies and their characters. On the other hand, though, Anna Schmidt is obviously no femme fatale; like Gloria Grahame’s character in In a Lonely Place (1950), a quasi-film noir about obsession and loss that vilifies Humphrey Bogart much more than the movie’s female protagonist, Anna is a sympathetic character who is nonetheless trapped amidst a sea of inescapable darkness. I can’t resist anthropomorphizing the camera here: if the film camera were a sentient being, arranged by the filmmakers yet responding to the scene with its own emotions, I would imagine this hypothetical kino-eye would want to weep for Anna Schmidt.

An atypical film noir, “In a Lonely Place” (1950, directed by Nicholas Ray) sympathizes with its female protagonist (played by Gloria Grahame) even as it smothers her with a blanket of dark, hopeless shadows. Image © Columbia Pictures.

On Tuesday, Jeremy aptly surmised that Holly is “a romantic living in a world that isn’t”, but this might be even more true of Anna. Even after being made aware of Harry’s indisputable (and unthinkable) crimes, she believes that “a person doesn’t change because you find out more”: he’s still the same magnetic, essentially good-hearted Harry, and his guilt can’t unsettle her love for him. In an unromantic world driven by the attainment of wealth, strict moral codes, and a seemingly unending cycle of war(s), Anna doesn’t belong, and today’s still seems to highlight her alienation. The preceding shots illustrate just how unromantic this world is: at the officious military-police headquarters, a Russian bureaucrat orders a throng of MPs to apprehend Anna while holding her passport in his hand; they then descend a vast and barren staircase, only to hop in an army Jeep and drive silently to Anna’s apartment in a shot reminiscent of one we’ve seen earlier in the film. How can Anna’s fervent view of humanity, in which relationships are ironclad and individual people are universes in themselves, survive a world so cold and materialistic? (And does Harry Lime’s worldview coincide more closely with Anna’s romanticism, Calloway’s narrow moralism, or Popescu’s greed?) The fact that today’s still is backed by Anton Karas’s aching zither score reaffirms Anna’s out-of-placeness: it seems to me that Karas’s score (touted in ads as distinctly Viennese and exotic) serves a similar function as Anna’s character, a poignantly heartfelt counterpoint to the film’s war-ravaged, greed-driven milieu.

I hope it’s not too much of a tangent to close with Pauline Kael’s review of Shoeshine, Vittorio De Sica’s masterful 1947 film (which Kael reviewed upon rerelease in 1961). At first glance Shoeshine and The Third Man don’t seem to have much in common, aside from the neorealist trope of shooting on location in actual cities in an effort to root out the character or maybe even the aura of a place. But Kael’s respect for Shoeshine‘s sincerity in an insincere world seems to have some bearing here:

When Shoeshine opened in 1947, I went to see it alone after one of those terrible lovers’ quarrels that leave one in a state of incomprehensible despair. I came out of the theater, tears streaming, and overheard the petulant voice of a college girl complaining to her boyfriend, ‘Well I don’t see what was so special about that movie.’ I walked up the street, crying blindly, no longer certain whether my tears were for the tragedy on the screen, the hopelessness I felt for myself, or the alienation I felt from those who could not experience the radiance of Shoeshine. For if people cannot feel Shoeshine, what can they feel? My identification with those two lost boys had become so strong that I did not feel simply a mixture of pity and disgust toward this dissatisfied customer but an intensified hopelessness about everything… Later I learned that the man with whom I had quarreled had gone the same night and had also emerged in tears. Yet our tears for each other, and for Shoeshine did not bring us together. Life, as Shoeshine demonstrates, is too complex for facile endings.

I wonder if Anna–who, as an actress by trade, would presumably have a tremendous capacity for identifying with the emotions and behavior of others–would react with similar earnestness to a movie like Shoeshine, which aches with a humanistic sincerity that has become unfashionable in our postmodern film climate. (Coincidentally, Orson Welles did respond with this kind of awed respect after seeing Shoeshine: “In handling a camera I feel that I have no peer,” Harry Lime himself said in 1960. “But what De Sica can do, that I can’t do. I ran his Shoeshine again recently and the camera disappeared, the screen disappeared; it was just life.”) If Kael and Welles both admired Shoeshine‘s ability to value sincerity and real human lives in a world (cinematic or otherwise) that seems dismissive of such humanism, they reflect both Anna and Holly’s melancholy isolation: they are indeed romantics in a world that isn’t. The Third Man–though seemingly more genre-driven and studio-oriented than Shoeshine–is about this very paradox (the endangerment of emotional sincerity in a disrupted modern world), and it too recognizes (like Shoeshine) that “life…is too complex for facile endings.” (As we’ll see, The Third Man‘s ending is about as far from facile as possible.) Finally, just as Kael personally identified with Shoeshine by carrying over events from her real life, one of the reasons I love The Third Man so much is that, when I first saw it as a stereotypically angsty teenager, I identified strongly with Holly’s disillusionment and his romantic difficulties. Whether it’s the larger-than-life performances, Graham Greene’s pitch-perfect dialogue, or Carol Reed’s thoughtful direction, Holly, Anna, and Harry all still seem like real people to me. In today’s still, we can see Anna’s loneliness and vulnerability emblazoned on the screen, and her heartache (like that of the two boys in Shoeshine) is both devastating and radiant.

Over the absolute length of one year — two times per week — Still Dots will grab a frame every 62 seconds of Carol Reed’s The Third Man. This project will run until December 2012, when we finish at second 6324. For a complete archive of the project, click here. For an introduction to the project, click here.

Second #4216, 70:16, Image © Studio Canal

This frame marks a sea change in the character of Major Calloway, a man whose brusque and callous nature has painted him as Holly’s antagonist throughout this film. We have occupied Holly’s gaze for much of this film, seeing Calloway as a suit, a figure that stands for an authoritarian view of society. Calloway has been Holly’s personification of “the man,” even if he is a particularly friendly one, and each time he has insisted that Holly should leave on the morning plane he has only cemented that position more securely. Like the hard-boiled detectives he must have read about, Holly’s interactions with Calloway have been ambivalent. He takes as much information as he can from them, but doesn’t stick to their code. Instead, Holly patterns himself on Marlowe and Spade, operating under his own moral system, one that, though tattered, is unbreachable. As Philip Marlowe once told a cop buddy:

“I’m a romantic, Bernie. I hear voices crying in the night and I go to see what’s the matter. You don’t make a dime that way. . . No percentage in it at all.”

Holly, like Philip Marlowe, cannot be bothered to break his moral code for money. He has stayed in this city licking up the scraps of his literary celebrity for one reason, his own romantic spirit. Whether his blossoming, but unrequited, love for Anna, his devout belief in Harry’s inherent goodness, or his romantic delusion that he is a detective looking for the truth, it is Holly’s romantic nature that keeps him in Vienna. Holly could likely be somewhere else, making a living without a life on the line, but like Marlowe, he is a romantic living in a world that isn’t. In his introduction to F for Fake, Orson Welles quotes the great magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, who said “A magician is just an actor. Just an actor playing a magician.” In that sense, perhaps, a detective is just an actor too, playing a detective. And Holly, a romantic novelist playing a detective, may be even further from reality, living on a moral code that stifles him but not those around him. And he’ll soon come face to face with that realization. For now, though, let’s turn back to the frame itself, one that displays only the corner of Holly’s hat, but is dominated by Calloway looking dreamily off camera right, his open expression surprisingly welcoming when compared to the scowl he has customarily worn throughout this film.

Here, we see Calloway as a truly compassionate figure for the first time. Rather than chastising Holly for sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong, as he has at almost every other interaction so far, he admits that he was wrong, and that Holly hasn’t been wrong to keep investigating. “We should have dug deeper than a grave,” he says while identifying the body that has been buried in Harry’s place. This offers us what is perhaps our first chance to switch our perspectives around a bit, and see the story through Calloway’s eyes. Just as Holly can begin to see Calloway’s side of the story, so can we let go of our doubts and understand how this man has seen everything all along. Reflection in eyes has been a long-lasting trope in cinema, from James Bond in Goldfinger(1964) seeing an attacker reflected in a woman’s eye to Agent Cooper of Twin Peaks(1990) seeing a motorcycle, but as we can see the glimmer of humanity in Calloway’s eyes, we can almost see Holly’s image reflected back in them. And, at least to Graham Greene’s original Major Calloway, Holly looked like this:

I made my first note on him for my security police files: “In normal circumstances a cheerful fool. Drinks too much and may cause a little trouble. Whenever a woman passes raises his eyes and makes some comment, but I get the impression that really he’d rather not be bothered. Has never really grown up and perhaps that accounts for why he worshipped Lime” (Greene,The Third Man, Penguin Books, 1949, pg. 13).

Though this Calloway lives in a different world, a literary world where Holly’s name is Rollo, his description seems to hold water when compared to the cheerful fool we can now see reflected in Calloway’s eyes. Our literary Calloway is a much more introspective figure than the harsh paper-pusher we see on the screen. His inner monologue seems much more aware than Holly’s, focusing not on the trivial squabbles of Americans in Vienna, but on the tragedy that is the city itself, which he calls “the smashed dreary city of Vienna.” Somehow this film has managed a remarkable switch in perspective. Although we’ve been saying all along what a fool and blowhard Holly is, we’ve never truly had any alternative to his point of view. Now, all of a sudden, his perspective will pull a full 180. Holly, finally convinced by Calloway to open his eyes and drop his belief in the infinite power of childhood friendship, has begun to entertain the idea that Harry is indeed a criminal, a brigand, maybe even “about the worst racketeer that ever made a dirty living in this city.” And not only that, but our view, which has followed Holly’s eyes to the hard shadows stalking him at every corner, has suddenly pulled out to reveal the whole workings of this dirty city. Normally, a paradigm shift of such monumental scale would necessitate a narrative twist, a tactic which fails almost as often as it succeeds, but what is so remarkable about this film is that Calloway has been telling us this story all along. Now, all of a sudden, we—and Holly—believe it.

Caligari’s Cesare sleeps in this coffin by day and commits murders by night.

Last week, Matt delved into the action going on in this scene, the exhumation of a body, drawing comparisons to the countless bodies exhumed in The X-Files. But while the body is important in this scene, we never see it, except—again—reflected in Calloway’s eyes. We watch him see the body after the coffin is lifted and thrown open. But coffins themselves, even without bodies in them, occupy a terrifying position in horror cinema. Whether a vampire like Nosferatu (1922) or a creature like Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) the coffin has never brought with it good connotations. And like Jonathan Harker in Dracula, it may be even more terrifying to find the coffin empty, and to know that what might have been in it is lurking somewhere unknown, maybe even somewhere close by. Our coffin, empty to our camera eye, carries with it all of the creatures that have occupied coffins in the past, and even when Calloway identifies the body, he knows that somewhere far off, Harry is alive.

Over the absolute length of one year — two times per week — Still Dots will grab a frame every 62 seconds of Carol Reed’s The Third Man. This project will run until December 2012, when we finish at second 6324. For a complete archive of the project, click here. For an introduction to the project, click here.