Identity crisis

The Third Man's mysteries live on

by Peter Keough

THE THIRD MAN, Directed by Carol Reed. Written by Graham Greene. With Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles, Alida Valli, Trevor Howard, Bernard Lee, Ernst Deutsch, Siegfried Breuer, Erich Ponto, Wilfrid Hyde-White, and Paul Hoerbiger. A Rialto Pictures release. At the Brattle Theatre June 18 through 24 and at the Coolidge Corner Theatre June 25 through July 1.

A war-devastated city picked over by feckless foreign powers and unscrupulous opportunists -- the world hasn't changed much in the 50 years since the zither music from The Third Man put it in a dither. People and movies have, though. The crisis of individuality and style that is so much the heart of the matter in this Graham Greene-concocted noirish pastry has long since been resolved for the worst. Restored to its director's-cut length, 11 minutes longer than David O. Selznick's American theatrical release (this fuller version has been available on video), Carol Reed's film seems cheekier and more vital than ever, a bittersweet eulogy to heroism and moral clarity and a mordant embrace of the quagmire to come.

As the title suggests, the nature of identity is the film's big question, and Selznick inadvertently added to the murk by his meddlings, so that from the beginning the question of authorship is in doubt. In a breezily sinister opening montage, a voiceover narrator, a kind of Conradian storyteller, sets the scene. In the original film the voice belonged to director Reed; in the American release it's that of Joseph Cotten, who plays protagonist Holly Martins. An American pulp-fiction writer down on his luck, Martins has traveled to Vienna at the invitation of his old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) to seek his fortune in the rubble and the black market of the bombed-out but still formidable old city.

Lime, as it turns out, is dead. Increasingly contradictory eyewitness reports describe him as having been hit by a car and carried across the street by his two friends Kurtz (Ernst Deutsch) and Popescu (Siegfried Breuer), where he spoke his last words and died. Or was he, as the old porter (Paul Hoerbiger) in Harry's apartment building says, already dead, and carried off by not two but three men? If so, then -- Grahame perhaps alluding to Luke's Gospel by way of Eliot's The Waste Land -- who is the third man?

Partial to drink and to the Wild West dynamics of his own "cheap novelettes," Martins is not the best equipped to get to the bottom of such a mystery. His cowboy posturings aside, he seems little more than a pawn for Lime's Nosferatu-like colleagues and for the dogged British investigator Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), who's driven to bring to justice all those involved in Lime's black-market penicillin scheme. Mostly, though, he's a sucker for Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli), Harry's lover and an actress whose wounded petal face smiles only on stage or when Holly in his blundering way reminds her of the dead man.

For Harry is the only spark of life in the moribund hulks of these characters, who exist on lost love or ideals or by sucking the blood of innocent victims. His resurrection more than two-thirds of the way through is perhaps what holds up least about the film; thereafter, its oblique, ironic philosophy becomes more pedantic, its masterful upending of narrative expectations becomes a predictable if incomparably atmospheric chase sequence, and Reed's style becomes more transparently a melange of Lang (the shadowy streets, tilted angles, and George Grosz-like close-ups, not to mention the accusing child and tipsy balloon seller, make it the post-war complement to the pre-war M), Hitchcock, and, of course, Orson Welles.

It is tempting to credit Welles with much of the film's look, feel, and meaning -- the perversely jangled tone (the jauntily elegiacal zither soundtrack seems his kind of inspiration), the enjambed dialogue, the search for the truth about a mystery man. If it were his, it would lie in stature somewhere between Mr. Arkadin and Citizen Kane. As it is, his sole contribution, besides his iconic presence (just his passport photos on Calloway's desk add a note of antic chaos), is his dyspeptic but jovial monologue in the Prater fairground. His smug words high above Vienna on the Riesenrad -- would you really mind if one of those dots stopped moving? -- come back to haunt him when he himself becomes a mere dot in the Grand Sewer hunted by latter-day Nazis. The words will haunt Holly -- and the viewer -- in the end when the dot that is Anna fills the camera and vanishes forever.

As for Lime's oft-quoted comments about the Borgias and the Renaissance and Switzerland and the cuckoo clock, the past 50 years has offered no evidence either way concerning the facile notion that strife breeds creativity and peace brings regimentation. What is the nature of genius -- that remains The Third Man's unsolved mystery.