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The Third
Man (1949, UK)
In director Carol Reed's British classic drama of
geopolitical intrigue and espionage, enhanced by the haunting
zither music soundtrack by Anton Karas, with the tagline: had the
tagline: "HUNTED...By a thousand men! Haunted...By a lovely
girl!"
- in the film's opening, the moody scenes of a shattered,
post-war Vienna - a devastated city racked with crime
- the graveyard scene as Harry Lime (Orson Welles) was
buried (he had allegedly been killed after being struck by a truck,
but he had faked his death) -
it was thought that a "third man" helped to carry Lime's
dead body after the incident
- Harry Lime's American unemployed pulp novelist friend
Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) and Harry's dark-haired mistress lover
Anna (Alida Valli) were in attendance; Anna was Harry's grieving,
depressed, Czech mistress/girlfriend, and a Russian
exile and refugee; she was employed as an actress at a local theater;
Anna exuded a fatalistically-romantic attraction for Harry, partially
because he had fixed papers (and passport) for her to avoid repatriation
or deportation by the Russians
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Harry Lime's Funeral-Graveyard Scene - Anna and
Holly Martins
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Anna in Attendance
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Anna Walking Home From Cemetery
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- after the ceremony, cynical British military police
officer Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) told Martins about
Lime's suspected occupation - a post-war black marketeer, involved
in the theft of penicillin from the military hospitals, dilution
to make it go further, and the watered-down drug's sale to patients
(including children) through the black market for a profit: "He
was about the worst racketeer that ever made a dirty living in this
city...You could say that murder was part of his racket"
- Holly looked up Anna following the funeral and found
her working as an actress on stage at the Josefstadt Theatre; she
looked shattered by the sudden death of her onetime lover; when Holly
asked if Anna was in love with Harry, she answered: "I don't
know. How can you know a thing like that afterwards? I don't know
anything more except I want to be dead too"; the two visited Harry's
old apartment and while Holly asked questions about Harry's strange
lethal accident, she wandered into the adjoining bedroom that she
knew intimately - she combed her hair in front of the mirror and
looked at an old photograph of herself
- when Anna returned home, she discovered that Calloway
had ordered a search of her apartment, and confiscated her faked
passport (presumably forged by Harry) and Harry's love letters to
her; she was taken to be detained at the international police
station for questioning before being released
- Holly visited Anna in her apartment where he found her disturbed
by loneliness and the passing of Harry - she asked for Holly to speak
about his childhood with Harry: "I've been alone, without friends
and money. But I've never known anything like this. Please talk.
Tell me about him." After
a short while when he was ready to go, she vowed to never fall
in love again - and then encouraged Holly: "You know, you ought
to find yourself a girl"
- later that night, he drunkenly returned to revisit
Anna, bringing her flowers; she was mournfully lying in bed in the
shadows, and wearing Harry Lime's striped, monogrammed pajamas (HL
on the left front); he
drunkenly called out to Anna's cat, but the cat ignored him and jumped
out the window - and was seen out on the street nuzzling up to a
stranger's shoe in the shadows. Anna claimed Harry was the only person
the cat liked. Although she couldn't bear criticism of Harry, after
learning from Holly that Harry was a ruthless black marketeer, Anna
now believed that Harry was "better dead. I knew he was mixed
up, but not like that." Holly was bitter that his good friend
was engaged in a deadly racket.
- by this time, the
doltish hack writer had hopelessly fallen in unrequited love with the
melancholy Anna but she was unresponsive to his clumsy advances.
He offered himself to her: ("I'd make comic faces
and stand on my head and grin at you between my legs and learn
all sorts of jokes. Wouldn't stand a chance would I? Hmmm? Well,
you did tell me I ought to find myself a girl"); a tear
fell from her eye, but she was completely uninterested
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Holly's Flowers For Anna
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Anna's Rejection of Holly's Love Interest
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A Tear Fell From Her Eye
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- outside Anna's apartment, as the dejected Holly walked
off, he became aware of a figure in a doorway on the opposite side
of the street when he saw Anna's cat in the shadows, snuggling next
to a person's black shoes in a doorway. The cat was licking itself,
and tipping off the presence of a silent and motionless person there.
The figure's big shoes were illuminated - was it one of Calloway's
men, underworld thugs or an intelligence agent? Holly abusively,
drunkenly, and defiantly shouted out to the figure. A light from
an irritated neighbor's upstairs window briefly illuminated the figure's
face - shining straight across the street.
- in a famous scene, the presumed-dead Harry Lime made
a delayed appearance about mid-way through the film - from a shadow
inside a doorway, an overhead light illuminated his enigmatic,
smirking, devilish face and Anna's cat snuggled at his feet; the
light was quickly extinguished, and before Holly could reach his
friend, a car approached and blocked his path by coming between them.
The figure made off and vanished to the sound of retreating footsteps
in the dark.
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The Sudden Appearance of Harry Lime
in the Shadows
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- Holly's suspicions that Lime was still alive were
confirmed when his coffin was dug up and the body was found to be
that of police informant Joseph Harbin, the medical orderly who had
acted as a police informer against Lime. Anna was visibly stunned
and gratified by the news given to her by Calloway, although she
also regretted it: "Poor
Harry. I wish he was dead. He would be safe from all of you
then"
- a legendary gripping encounter
then occurred between Lime and Martins at the top of the Prater
Ferris wheel high above a Viennese fairground; Lime first explained
how he didn't want to be a hero:
"What did you want me to do? Be reasonable. You didn't 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";
Lime also contemptuously looked down from the ferris wheel at the scuttling
mortals below, cheerfully calling the people unrecognizable "dots" from
the height of the ride:
"Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those
dots stopped moving forever?"
- then, once they had descended, Lime delivered a callous,
perverse "cuckoo clock" monologue about Switzerland and
cuckoo clocks, arguing that there was greater productivity in a warring,
strife-ridden culture and civilization than in a peaceful one; the
corruptible Lime cynically justified his black market criminal activities,
and equated the corrupt political intrigues of the Borgias to the
artistic triumphs of Michelangelo and da Vinci: "In Italy for
thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder,
bloodshed - but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and
the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years
of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock"
- ultimately, Holly decided to
set up Lime in exchange for Anna's freedom from deportation to the
Russians (because of her forged passport) after Calloway asked him
to name his "price." In
the Vienna Railway Station cafe, where Anna was about to board
a train to take her away to be saved, she learned that Holly was
betraying their mutual friend to the police in return for helping
to get her out of Vienna safely - and she was furious. She vowed
to remain faithful to Harry no matter what she knew about him,
even if her own freedom was at stake
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of ignorance and her dedication to her role as the doomed man's
mistress, Anna didn't want to betray or sell out Harry ("I'm not going!"),
because she loved him for what he was: "I don't want him anymore.
I don't want to see him, hear him. But he's still a part of me, that's
a fact. I couldn't do a thing to harm him.... If you want to sell
your services, I'm not willing to be the price. I loved him. You
loved him. What good have we done him? Love! Look at yourself. They
have a name for faces like that?" She
ripped up her new passport and departed with her belongings from
the train.
- the concluding sequence was
prefaced by the presence of guards and police searching for Lime
in the city. Holly
agreed to be a decoy and arranged to meet Lime at Cafe Marc Aurel
with police staked out to arrest the black marketeer. Anna arrived
and denounced Holly: "Honest, sensible, sober, harmless Holly
Martins. Holly - what a silly name. You must feel very proud to be
a police informer" just before Harry entered the cafe - she was able
to warn him of the danger he faced ("Harry, get away, the police
are outside - Quick!"), and he fled
- the film ended with fugitive Harry Lime being
sought by authorities, led by British Army police official, Major
Calloway; there was a thrilling, extraordinary chase sequence,
first through bomb-sites and down an open manhole, and then into
the passageways of subterranean dark sewers and tunnels under Vienna
that still linked all the occupied sections of the city; the climactic
scenes were sharply edited for greater impact; the
sewers were the dark, unobserved haunt of wounded black marketeer
Harry Lime where his 'underground' evil-doings had permeated through
the borders of the city's zones; in the manhunt by an international
police force composed of police from all four nations,
the filming captured the dark shadows on the ancient tunnel walls
and the cobblestone surfaces
- after a long pursuit sequence, Harry
shot Sergeant Paine (Bernard Lee) dead with the gunshots echoing
off the tunnel walls. Lime was shot and wounded by Major Calloway
as he scrambled away
- as fugitive Harry made another break to escape, he
was caught and cornered like a rat in the bowels of Vienna; he crawled
up a circular iron stairway to reach a grill-covered man-hole - his
fingers clutched, curled, strained and poked through the sewer grill
grating (filmed from the street level) as he desperately and vainly
tried to push it up, but he had been weakened by his gunshot wound
from Calloway and was unable to move the solidly-jammed grill cover
and flee into the street
Chase After Harry Lime into the Sewer
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Harry Lime - On the Run and Firing Back
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Holly Martins Joining in the Pursuit
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Wounded and Crawling Up Circular Stairway to Man-Hole
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Trying to Push Open Sewer Grating
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Lime's Fingers Extended Through Sewer Grating
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- Martins noticed Harry at the
top of the iron stairway beneath the grating, and found his old friend
struggling there, in great pain and fear; Calloway
shouted out from a distance: "Be careful, Martins. Don't take any
chances, if you see him, shoot"
- Harry
looked down and saw Holly looking up at him; he wordlessly appealed
to his friend Holly, making a wink-like gesture or nod, to shoot;
ironically, it had been left to Holly to kill his oldest friend;
a gunshot sounded off-screen - and Calloway halted; Holly's silhouette
appeared at the end of the smoky tunnel - he had pulled the trigger
and shot his friend dead - an ending typical of a Western tale;
he had treacherously murdered and betrayed his oldest, closest and
trusted friend
- in the famed ending after Harry's second funeral and
burial in the
same cemetery that opened the film (it was a second funeral
ceremony for Lime), an exquisite closing sequence, Holly attempted
to say goodbye to Anna. Leaving the graveyard in Calloway's vehicle,
he asked to be let out; he awaited her approach toward him down the
tree-lined, empty cemetery avenue, but she deliberately walked by and
stoically ignored him and continued on, passing by the
awaiting Holly without paying any attention
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Post-War Vienna
Holly Martins' Arrival in Vienna
Major Calloway with Holly Martins
Anna as Actress in Local Theater
Anna Combing Hair in Harry's Apartment
Calloway Searching Anna's Apartment and Taking Harry's Love Letters
Anna to Holly: "You ought to find yourself a girl"
Anna's Pajamas with Harry's Monogram
Lime's Ferris Wheel Encounter
Lime's
"Cuckoo Clock" Speech
At Train Station - Anna: "I'm not going!" - She Ripped Up Her Passport
Anna Warning Harry at Cafe: "Harry, get away, the police are outside - Quick!"
Holly Looking Up at the Cornered Harry
Lime and Being Given Permission to Kill
Holly At the End of the Tunnel
Anna's Exit After Harry's 2nd Funeral
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