Hands up, poseur cinephiles!
Bryant Gumbel famously said in the aftermath of the Epic in Miami (probably the most exciting game ever played on the professional gridiron), “If you didn’t like this football game, then you don’t like football!”. Didn’t matter if your team was in the game, didn’t matter if you (rightly) shuddered at the sight of Dan Fouts’ beard. Hell, I was six and a half years away from being born at the time the game was played, and just watching the monumental swings of that afternoon on NFL Network makes my blood pressure spike.
Take a look at the iconic image of two fellow Chargers taking a drained, depleted Kellen Winslow under each arm after overtime, then come back and tell me there’s no poetry in the game of football. In its own way that snapshot encapsulates the heroism of an ancient warrior, who would sooner die himself than leave a wounded brother on the field.
Even though I wasn’t there, and any experience I’ll ever have of the Epic will be secondhand, I know what Mr. Gumbel meant when he sounded that immortal call. Every art form high and low has its defining moments, and there is a kind of exhilaration that can only be felt by any one’s purest devotees. For me, it’s movies.
I’ve been accused of snobbery on the subject many times, but I insist to you that I have absolutely no scorn for those who approach movies avocationally. And even though The Movies are more than an avocation for me, I have my share of controversial opinions and omissions. I’ve never seen The Seventh Seal, nor Gone with the Wind (though I probably will). I fell asleep during The Searchers (though I was 17 at the time). And I’m the guy who told Francis Ford Coppola to go fuck himself.
I’m not precious about “classic” films. I know that film itself is still a very young art with a limited corpus, and that by the time I have grandchildren, The Lion King and Pirates of the Caribbean will be as classic as Chinatown, if not more. And yet…amid this sea of subjective leniency…there is one movie whose dismissal by my black-and-white-fearing peers I cannot let pass…and that movie is Carol Reed’s The Third Man.
It’s perfectly ironic because, passing the movie on cable, one could be forgiven the assumption that it was Citizen Kane. The two stars are the same, and though Orson Welles laughed off years’ worth of rumors that he ghost-directed, it would be foolery to state that Reed was not at least influenced by his star’s former picture. Citizen Kane is a great and influential movie, but in my opinion eclipsed by The Third Man in almost every way.
In an era when the vast majority of movies were filmed within the walls of Hollywood, The Third Man demonstrated the power of location shooting. I find a certain romance, to be sure, in older movies that are obviously filmed on sets (I like Marlon Brando’s “friends, Romans, countrymen” speech even though it’s manifestly not the Roman senate behind him), but what they gain in romance they lose in authenticity. If you can’t bask in the slick streets, smoky sewers and neo-Gothic architecture of The Third Man‘s Vienna, I don’t know what to tell you. The movie is like a jacuzzi of atmosphere.
Once more, I don’t simply treasure black and white because it’s old. I treasure it because of the way it serves traditional film noir, the way every shadow looks like a ghost that might leap out and kill you. Saw might not have played to today’s kids in black and white (although I think it’s possible), but it would without a doubt have been scarier.
Orson Welles always said every performance was better in black and white. I don’t know if that’s true, and try as I may, I find it hard to defend some of the acting that passed for A-list talent in those days. Humphrey Bogart was good, Laurence Olivier was good, but Tyrone Power and Fred MacMurray were horrible. I like Vivien Leigh, but I acknowledge she’s too melodramatic and sultry for today’s audiences to digest.
I thank Brando and Montgomery Clift for making movie acting better, yet that doesn’t disqualify all the performances that pre-date them. And, in the case of The Third Man, the acting transcends all generational evolutions. Joseph Cotton is very good as our everyman, more disturbed in every scene as the city’s seedy underbelly envelops him. Convinced his looks and his wit are enough to win the girl’s heart, when they’re not.
Then there’s Orson Welles. Really, he’s not in most of the movie, but that’ll make you cherish his few moments all the more. He was never handsome, but he was not yet a dead ringer for Jabba the Hutt, and he’s actually good enough to convince you he was handsome. Take his famous close-up where he leers from the doorway at Joseph Cotton, to whom he’s at this point an apparition. The energy in his eyes, then that devilish smirk that in a few seconds tells us all the illicit compulsions this man is capable of setting afire. I’m not saying Orson is a heartthrob, but after seeing The Third Man, you may reconsider the kind of sex he had with Rita Hayworth.
Orson has two monologues in which he channels the value system of Lucifer, and impels Cotton and us to follow suit. There’s the one with a view-count in the five figures on YouTube (quite a lot for a 1940s excerpt), which builds to the famous “cuckoo clock” punchline. But the more resonant speech for me comes in the previous scene, while they’re stopped at the top in the ferris wheel (another Vienna landmark the movie immortalized). When Cotton offers the usual “what you’re doing is wrong” protests to his buddy’s evil devisings, Harry Lime (Orson) directs his attention downward: from a perch that high, all the hundreds of people walking the streets are mere “specks”.
Someone offers you twenty thousand bucks to wipe out one of those myriad tiny specks. Would you object, or would you be silently tabulating how much you could make off the deal? That’s how the devil works, you see: the ol’ Socratic method. He’s not trying to win you over; he’s unlocking knowledge and desires in you that are intrinsic.
Unrealistic? Ever notice how the Department of Defense always refers to “losses” or “casualties” rather than “deaths”? These icy, Mephistophelean rationalizations are all around us.
The Third Man plays, as it must, by the Hays Code, and evil is vanquished at the end. And yet…not really. It might be the bad guy getting lowered into the ground and the good guy living to tell the tale, but the far reach of Orson’s influence is not left overlooked. Not only is his girlfriend hitched to his unholy memory, but we get the sense there’s a Harry Lime of some kind lurking in every crevice and every looming shadow this dark city holds. Evil people die, but evil lives.
I also appreciate that Harry’s machinations are not sanitized in any way; his victims run the gamut from man, woman to child. Yes, he even preys on children. Even in a movie as grim and hard-hitting as The Dark Knight, you kind of knew Two-Face wouldn’t pull the trigger on Gordon’s son.
There’s a twistedness to The Third Man, an encapsulating temptation about it, that does no less than embody the glamour of sitting in a dark room and letting pictures roll by our eyes at twenty-four frames per second (or thirty, I suppose, in 1949). And so, the next time you emerge from a lousy movie and some annoying middle schooler is anointing it the “best movie EVER”, let them have it. Let them embrace the movies they will.
Unless they don’t embrace The Third Man. At that point, anything else they say about movies is meaningless.
