David Hast: Scott, have you seen The Third Man?
Scott Vander Werf: I have seen The Third Man more times than I can probably remember. And it goes back to when I was a teenager. I saw it on TV probably in the 1970s. And then of course I saw it several times in film school. And then I've watched it for my own pleasure ever since.Love The Third Man.
DH: It is a great, great movie. I've seen it twice. That's it. I saw it for the first time about five years ago and just watched it again.
SVW: Wow. That is amazing to me that you...a connoisseur of great classic film has not seen the third man.
DH: …Film noir and all that. Yeah. Well, it's British. I mean, somehow it slipped under the radar.
SVW: Directed by Carol Reed and it was written by Graham Greene, the great novelist.
DH: Yes. And famously starring Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles and with unbelievable cinematography by the American cinematographer Robert Krasker. This actually wasn't purely a British production, it was a co-production between the big British producer Alexander Korda and the American producer David O. Selznick, the producer of Gone with the Wind. So it was like a co-production, but it was entirely in the hands of the British team. The British made it, they had creative control over it, but it has American actors, Joseph Cotton, Orson Welles, and their deal was for the distribution in the United States.
SVW: And it all it takes place in Vienna and it also has a lot of obviously Viennese, Austrian,German. There's Russian actors in here as well.
DH: Yeah, this movie is 1949 and it's shot on location and almost entirely except for a few studio shots. So almost entirely on location in the bombed out city of Vienna. You know, this is the city is still in ruins to a great extent. And then you combine that with this sort of obsolete,baroque look of the city of Vienna with its old interiors and you combine those two and it really has a kind of negative pessimistic feeling even visually the whole movie.
SVW: Although it's gorgeous.
DH: Well the cinematography is unbelievable. mean some people rank it among the greatest photography jobs of all time as well as among the greatest of thrillers and some people say, oh I wouldn't classify it as film noir and you can see why for some reasons. It's really a post-war thriller and a mystery,but people categorize it along with noir too because of its noir look and also because of this sort of pessimism and negativity and moral ambiguity that pervades the movie. The story begins with an American writer who writes like paperback westerns named Holly Martins, which is kind of a funny name and he even says to people, have a funny name. He arrives in war-torn Vienna to visit his friend Harry Lyme. But he quickly learns right away that Harry is dead. He's been run over by a car and killed.And Holly's there right when the funeral is happening. He goes to the funeral. There's just a few people there, a couple of really suspicious looking Viennese men and a young woman who Holly gets to know, Anna, and she was Harry Lyme's lover. Holly learns that here's what happened to Harry. The two men who were at the funeral supposedly carried this mortally injured Harry out of the street after he got hit by a car. And there was a third man who helped carry the mortally wounded Harry across the street, hence the title of the movie, The Third Man, because Holly sets off trying to find out who this third man is because no one seems to want to identify him. And the more Holly looks into it, the more suspicious the whole thing looks. And then to his dismay, he meets a British army officer. This is occupied Vienna, right? It's after World War II. Vienna was part of the Axis, right? They were an ally of the Nazis. So it's occupied by the British, the French, the Americans, and the Soviets. And here's this British army officer played by the great British actor Trevor Howard. And he and his assistant are investigating something and eventually Holly learns from them that his friend Harry Lyme, his old friend from like college days in the United States, was deeply involved in black market trade in things that may have caused a great deal of harm to innocent people, including children. That's all we can say. The specifics of what happens we can't say because about two thirds of the way through this movie, there was a huge surprise, right?
SVW: Yes. And it's interesting that the film really the central protagonist is Joseph Cotton.
DH: Yes.
SVW: He's the central protagonist really, I would say you mentioned Trevor Howard playing the British Army officer. In some ways, he's the hero of the movie.Joseph Cotton is your sort of stereotypical bumbling, ugly American, ugly in the terms of his behavior and in terms of bumbling himself into scenes that he shouldn't be in, getting other people in trouble along with himself. And he's also seems to have a problem with alcohol.
DH: Yeah. I mean, there's no question there. They're sort of making fun of the Americans. I mean, this was written by Graham Green, who wasn't didn't love Americans. And it's true. It's a British director. It's a British production.
SVW: It's not that Joseph Cotton's character like he's unlikeable. No, no. But it's just he's a bumbling.
DH: I think that, the way that we see often the British and the Europeans portray Americans as that is that we're sort of happy go, luckily, gutsy and clueless and Americans just sort of, they don't live by the old rules of politeness and they just, they're kind of, like you said, the ugly American, they just do stuff. But on the other hand, it's not like they're showing us as bad, right? But this character is, he does actually is kind of directly responsible for maybe one person getting killed, you know, because he just says stuff out loud, which is really stupid. He's not aware that there's something really sinister going on here. You have to be careful.
SVW: He's not aware of the fact that he can't trust anybody.
DH: Yeah, right. Yeah, that's another stereotype of the Americans. They're trusting, they're open, they're friendly, but that isn't always good.
SVW: Except that he has this instinctive distrust of authority too. So he's actually suspicious of all the military people and the police.
DH: Right. He's less likely to be just go along with the rules and obey. So it's a complicated portrayal of Americans, both favorable and unfavorable. Orson Welles in the movie, you know, can't, again, this is part of the surprise, but he has a small but very memorable role.Joseph Cotton, you know, we should say, who's Joseph Cotton? A lot of people have sort of forgotten him. We talked about him when we did one of our shows on Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, in which he plays a really evil character, the Uncle Charlie to the young girl Charlie in the small town in LA. A very dark thriller. But Cotton is was one of the actors from Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater, his theater group that was active in the 30s that did the War of the Worlds on the radio, the famous broadcast. And then famously, many of them were cast in Orson Welles debut film Citizen Kane, including Joseph Cotton.
SVW: One of the things in terms of it's like we've said this in other about other movies to Vienna becomes almost a character in the movie, the city itself, the setting. It's so wonderfully shot and in black and white and whether it's at night or during the day, as you mentioned, the buildings, these ancient buildings, the interiors and the exteriors.But yeah,the cinematography is just magnificent.
DH: Yeah. And they had no choice, right? It was like, are shooting this movie as one of the first British films ever shot on location like this. And they stuck to it, you know, and they shot virtually all of it using the relocations, which meant they were stuck with it, but they absolutely made the best of it. So the way it looks, they shoot a lot at night, so very often the streets are deserted. So it's this kind of stark, noir-ish photography, know, single source lighting. They use these very bright arc lights that they hid. They'd be around the corner or something. So you'd just see this light, like, pouring into the street from what source you couldn't see, but a single source. And then they had these huge shadows cast on the walls of building. People would pass in front of the light, these big shadows. And then the parts of Vienna they were in had these old cobblestone streets.And Carol Reed, the director, figured out, along with the cinematographer, that if they watered down the streets and then let it dry up most of the way, it had this incredibly cool, shiny look that reflected that light. And once again, you get that characteristic of noir, where you have very bright whites and very black blacks and not a ton of grays. So that looks great.Another thing they did, this is maybe what it's most famous for in its photography, is they used Dutch Tilts extensively.Dutch Tilt is, I don't know where the term came from. Actually, I heard that it might be just a mispronunciation of Deutsch, meaning German, and it refers to the German silent films like the expressionistic films of the 1920s, like The Cabin of Dr.Caligari and things like that, where they purposely did things on a tilt, things weren't like lined up horizontal and vertical.So many, many of the shots in this are, they're not level. They're tilted one way or the other. The horizon is at an angle, the verticals are at an angle, and then with using the wide angle lenses that they used added to it, everything in the movie, whether you're talking literally or figuratively, everything is a tilt.
SVW: Everything's a tilt and in terms of the you're really describing all the way they did the way that they shot the exteriors but even in some of the two shots with two characters talking the camera is at an angle as well. It's through the whole film it's like that and in in the contemporary showings of the film in the United States there were some critics that didn't like it because they thought it was it was too crooked.
DH: Yeah I read a funny little story about Carol Reed was over here, I'm not sure for what, but the famous director William Wyler gave him like a level, like a carpenter's level as a gift,as a joke…for your next movie.
SVW: Another thing we have to talk about in this movie is the score, which is a zither score. Carol Reed discovered this musician playing in a restaurant or a bar, you know, just to a small crowd. And he had to convince him to agree to do the film. There was a process in terms of convincing this guy to score the film. And then he ended up having an international career as a result of it.
DH: Mostly playing the third man theme everywhere he went, right? Yeah, but this guy was like a street musician, right? He didn't read music maybe or, you know…
SVW: I can't remember reading anything about that. I just remember that he was somebody that was basically like here in Grand Rapids, local musicians who might play in a bar or restaurant on a weekend night. He was like that in Vienna.
DH: Yeah, and I remember the first time I saw the movie, I was kind of annoyed by it at first. I'm thinking, are they going to use any conventional orchestration at all? mean, what's the zither? It's a multi-stringed...
SVW: It's a flat top table on a table with the strings up. And has a lot of strings. Like a steel guitar or a dobro.
DH: But doesn't have a lot of strings like
SVW: yeah
DH: yeah, like so so like a table harp almost or something, right?
SVW: Yeah, that's a good way to describe it.
DH: Yeah. So the first time I saw it at first, I was a little annoyed. But the more it went on, the more I realized it really does fit the mood. It fits the mood. It fits the whole scenery and it has an otherworldly sense, sensibility around it.
SVW: I loved it when I saw it. Yeah, saw it the first time. I'm not sure. Actually, when I say the first time I saw it, I was quite young on TV. I don't know if it made the impression, a big impression then, but I remember probably the second time I saw it was when I was in film school and right away the score just leaped out as something that I loved.
DH: And it's quite a risk. In fact, this movie, if you think about it, is full of them taking risks in terms of conventional movie production.The standard in movies in the golden age of Hollywood and it's parallel in Great Britain at the same time, in the 40s you...you make the movie and then you score it. The studios had their own orchestras and a composer writes the score and usually conducts the orchestra and they record the music watching the cut of the movie and that's how you score a movie. And to just use this one instrument over and over and nothing else.And along with the idea of shooting in this bombed out city on location. Putting things at a tilt. mean, we look at it now and it looks cool. And yeah, maybe some people didn't like it at the time. It certainly looks cool now. But what a risk that was to take as a production. You know, they did many, many things that the studio executives would go, no, you can't do this.
SVW: And it's the movie moves very well from the beginning till the end.It kept my attention. This last screening, like I said, I don't know how many times I've actually seen it. I was still riveted. And one of the things I noticed was that they don't linger on scenes.The segues from one scene to another are very quick at times, but it doesn't feel abrupt either. And I found that to be very interesting.
DH: And when you say it moves quickly, I don't have the running time in front of me, but it's not a long movie. I mean, it's one of those like 90-minute movies, maybe 100.
SVW: Yeah, that makes sense.
DH: Which we're always harping on on this show about how you can make...some of the most brilliant movies ever made are 90, 95 minutes long or even shorter.here people get nowadays, people make movies that are two and a half hours long and you're just like, cut a few scenes out.
SVW: One thing we should also mention, cause I can remember hearing this 40 years ago is that there was a rumor because Wells had a role in this film that he actually might have directed it, just like the movie Gremlins. A lot of people are still thinking that Steven Spielberg, who produced Gremlins, actually directed it, but he didn't.Obviously there's a clip you can see online of Orson Welles basically saying no. I think it might be from the Dick Cavett show, basically responding and saying no, that I didn't direct it.
DH: Yeah, he clearly made it. He made it very clear that it was and it was not written by him either. There's a famous when Wells has his his small role in it, there's a speech that famously he apparently wrote himself and kind of improvised, but he was clear that Graham Greene wrote this and Carol Reed was an excellent director and Carol Reed directed it.
SVW: Definitely a movie worth watching.
DH: Absolutely, The Third Man.
SVW: Thanks for joining us.
DH: Thank you.
