Bright Young Things discussion
Film & TV (1900-1945)
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The Third Man (Vienna 1945) released 1949
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A stunning film and a personal favourite that perfectly captures the fractured world of post-war Europe - wonderful direction, superlative cinematography, haunting theme tune, very atmospheric, and with great performances. How anyone could hate it is beyond me.
Love the zither music and the chase through the sewers.
I love that film! It is fantastic! How anyone could hate it...well, lost for words...The band Ultravox were inspired by it when they made the Vienna video. The opening sequence however was filmed in Covent Garden in good old London. Those cobbled streets are fab!
Oh and one does not have to be religious/spiritual to be moral. I have no idea as to whether Greene was a Catholic when he wrote it. Can't remember, but was the story written for film or before it? Holly Martins doesn't come across as a religious character, yet he decides what is right and fair and that his friend is doing something very wrong by his own judgement.
Anton Karas played the zither for the film. Wonderful!
One of my most favorite films. Ask anyone who the star is and they'll say Orson Welles. He was in the film less than fifteen minutes. He should have had the Oscar as Harry Lime - the definition of Best Supporting Actor.
I think the book was written after the film, although possibly before the release. They wanted a book to go along with the movie.
A great suspense film set in the rubble and aftermath of WWII. It's a classic, right up there with "Bicycle Thieves". This is where the post-war malaise had the strongest cross-over with the emerging aesthetic of the film noir.
If I remember correctly Carol Reed and Graham Greene were on the lookout for another project to work on together after the success of The Fallen Idol.
Greene, so legend has it, was at a sparsely attended funeral in the deep winter and jotted down on the back of an envelope a couple of lines. Those lines turned in to the screenplay for The Third Man and the short novel was written not for publication but as a guide to write the screenplay by.
How I'd love to lay my hands on that envelope!
Greene, so legend has it, was at a sparsely attended funeral in the deep winter and jotted down on the back of an envelope a couple of lines. Those lines turned in to the screenplay for The Third Man and the short novel was written not for publication but as a guide to write the screenplay by.
How I'd love to lay my hands on that envelope!
My companion hated the movie largely because Holly Martins is such a dweeb. He's the type of the fatuous American who deals with complex problems by jumping up and down, assuming that people are as simple as he is. He is not a noticing person, but driven by assumptions and preconceptions.Of course, these things are part of how we read the movie for its significance.
Harry Lime is magnificently reprehensible, narcissistic. Something might be made of changes in the portrayal of evil in popular art through the period 1900-1945, I suspect, but not by me.
By the way, she didn't like the music, either.
One of my favorite scenes in the film is the first appearance of Harry Lime (Welles) standing in the dark doorway. At that point in his life Welles was still a very striking person and when the camera pans to his face, his looks don't match his evil persona........but that is why he was such a good actor. He could be evil and look angelic.
I love this film! One of my all time favourites. Great scene!
This is as close as I could find to that particular scene.
Interesting about what you say about his looks. The scene at the end in the sewer. Is he beckoning Holly Martin to shoot him? Doesn't he nod? Yet his angelic looks makes you feel a tiny bit sorry for him...only slightly...
Welles was simply bigger than life. He had magnetism. When he's on screen you don't look anywhere else. Ask anyone who the star of "The Third Man" is and they will say: Orson Welles - and yet he's on screen less than fifteen minutes. That magnetism is what makes him the perfect Rochester in "Jane Eyre" - there have been many great Jane's but only one GREAT Rochester - and that is because he is the perfect actor for that role.
@Ivan......magnetism is the perfect word for Welles. In his younger years he was knock-you-down handsome and even in older life when he had put on all that weight and grown a beard, he still had that "something" that was appealing to both women and men. Plus he had that great resonant voice.It is a shame that Hollywood ruined his career......or did he ruin it himself by making bad choices? I'm not sure. But as time goes by, he has still become a face and a talent that is familiar to all who love film.
He achieved too much too soon. Much like Truman Capote. Both bit the hand that fed them. And their early successes showed there was no way to go but down. The power brokers never let either one of them forget who was in charge afterwards.Even so, I am a major fan of most of his movies. I heard his daughter say that The Third Man was the only movie he did with his real nose; that is, he didn't do anything in this one to change his nose. Although he did generally change his nose.
The power brokers ruined many careers during the big studio days. The myth that silent film star John Gilbert failed in talkies because he had a high voice is just that....a myth. He was cast in films that had the overly romantic dialogue that obviously didn't show up in silents......it sounded stilted and silly and audiences stayed away in droves. But the studios kept miscasting him and his star plummeted. The only decent role he had was in Queen Christina with Garbo and only because she insisted. He died soon afterward. The Mayers and Goldwyns of Hollywood held the fate of actors in their hands and misused it horribly.
Jill wrote: "The power brokers ruined many careers during the big studio days. The myth that silent film star John Gilbert failed in talkies because he had a high voice is just that....a myth. He was cast in fi..."Gilbert was just making too much money. His voice in Queen Christina was a little thin but that could have been worked on ... if they'd wanted to. But he was the highest paid actor at the time. And once Mayer knew he was the son of a prostitute he didn't want Gilbert anywhere near the movies. I just loved The Big Parade.
Jan C wrote: "He achieved too much too soon. Much like Truman Capote. Both bit the hand that fed them. And their early successes showed there was no way to go but down. The power brokers never let either one of ..."Capote and Welles - that's a perfect analogy. Both were brilliant - but by the middle to end of their careers they had become caricatures.
Its a sad commentary on what can happen to great talents.
Graham Greene (the author and scriptwriter) stands at the core of the noir tradition. In crime fiction, the shift from the English Classic to Noir is marked by fears driven by the looming of yet another ghastly war. What was an orderly society contaminated by a few bad apples threatens to become a chaotic immoral society within which a few good people strive to protect themselves. At the end of the war there was a period of hope that the Allies had fought an honorable war and would reap an honorable peace. But there was an uneasiness about this, which (again, in crime fiction) would emerge in the new hardboiled style -- I distinguish between noir and hardboiled.
The Third Man stands at this juncture, and the problem posed by WWII is captured in the feckless detective Holly Martins. He finds that moral realism is indissolubly bound with cynicism and loss of faith.
The fear for our spiritual well-being which powered the noir genre held up only so long as we could hope it was otherwise, just as the English Classic world of Hercule Poirot had finally to give way to noir when it became obvious that we could no longer fool ourselves. At the end of the war we began to realize that we had lost the moral struggle and that the way ahead was through calculated threat and violence.
Perhaps a less than welcome reading of the state of affairs at the end (the demise) of the bright young things, but one which I think marks out the road from the state of affairs in 1900.