500 years of Swiss democracy =

A cuckoo clock.

I have watched Carol Reed's The Third Man too many times to count, and have owned it on every format it has come out on. First the old, non-Criterion dvd that I stole from my father, then the old Criterion re-mastery, next the newer Criterion re-remastery, and finally, the Criterion Blue-Ray edition of the film now that I have a Blue-Ray player to match the HDTV my mother kindly bought for my wife and I to counterbalance the washing machine and dryer she bought for my brother (my father, of course, lacks this sense of equal distribution, and will do things like call me to talk to me about how he is tired of his current camera body, and wants to give it to my younger brother, despite the fact that my brother already owns a different make of camera, and thus lacks the lenses to attach to said body. I myself actually do own lenses that would work with my father's camera body, but when I point out to him that I would not mind using his old camera body, he immediately retracted his desire to part with it). I have read this book on it published by the BFI, as well as this one. I have even bought the remastered soundtrack of the film off of iTunes, and, unfortunately for my wife, make her listen to it on drives to her parents house (nothing like a little zither music to get you hungry for Sunday brunch!) I like the film so excessively I even bent the curriculum of a Humanities class I used to teach to show it to my students, who, generally, also loved it.

The movie has been consistently ranked number one by the British Film Institute (ahead of the under-edited but beautifully shot Lawrence of Arabia, the practically perfect 39 Steps, and the elegant The Red Shoes), and really is shot-by-shot perfect, clocking in at 104 minutes, with possibly the best, lowest brow score to appear in film (Yojimbo's almost matches it, except it takes more than one dude sitting in a hotel room to play its score). Herbert Dreyfus who teaches the movie in his Existentialism in Literature & Film class at UC Berkley 'reads' the movie from a Kierkegaardian perspective (he even has this handy chart to explain the four man characters positions in relation to the ethical and the religious), but I think he slightly misses the point, both artistically and philosophically.

The composition of the film, its very creation, is one of happy circumstance. The best speech in the film, this one: <

was made up on the spot by Welles, and the famous ending, where Anna simply passes by Holly after we have had to wait two minutes for her to walk towards him was not in the script. Reed and Greene disputed whether the film (or film in general) had the weight to carry such an unhappy ending. Thankfully, Greene won out. Personally, I find the ending deeply satisfying, as Holly is the embodiment of simplistic morality, American cocksureness, is an artistic cad, and Anna has previously told him, in what has to be the best kiss-off a man has ever heard, that if he were to call her up, she would not be able to tell him if he were fair, dark, or if he had a mustache or not. The entire film has a really lark-y quality to it, from Greene randomly hearing from an OSS officer about the importance of the Viennese sewers during the war to Anton Karas happening to be playing the zither in a restaurant Greene was eating at one night. This quality gets at the Dionysian heart of the film, and posits the superiority and necessity of chaos in artistic creation, and the possibly of evil coming from it (as Heracleitus says, "war is father of all, king of all. Some it makes gods, some it makes men, some it makes slaves, some free") over the false, Apollonian order that attempts to rule the city after the war. Harry is clearly the most attractive character in the film, despite his betrayal of Anna, and her choice of him over Holly simply confirms, to both him and us, the Higher Immediacy of his actions. The movie is also clearly aware of itself, and plays with the boundaries of Noir, from the false burial to the femme fatale to the small dog that always betokens the evil of its owner. It constantly and willfully rubs up against these low-brow genre barriers, much like Pnin rubs up against the wishes of his narrator for him to act in certain ways.  It is almost self-aware (Holly wanted to name his next book 'The Third Man', and the western, thriller-esque quality to the movie which cut against its higher philosophic and aesthetic composition) but never breaks character, instead constantly fluctuating between documentary, thriller, noir, and western, much like The Wasteland fluctuates between its different voices. Godard might be more joyful, but he's also more showy.

The title of the film is a pull directly from Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, and has to do with science's desire for technical superiority over the truth, thus differentiating from theoretical man's (Socrates') search for the truth.  It is utterly impossible to watch the film, to see Vienna, the heart of intellectual Europe, bombed out, and not read it as a philosophic argument against the Enlightenment and 2,500 years of rational thought. If rationalism, progress, and technical development lead us here, where does that leave us? At our worst (and our best) it leaves us with Harry Lime, a man who has been freed from all morality, and stands either godlike above men, counting how many dots he can stop moving for $20,000 each (tax free, of course) or travels below them in the sewers, subverting all attempts at a rational ordering of the city between the various powers. Those sewers are always there, and as earnestly as the post-war powers (all powers) attempt to carve out a sphere where reason and techne can rule, Harry will always be there to break free. It is no small thing that Harry almost makes it out, his fingers (Reed's actually) grasping through a sewer grate before he dies, and it is also no small thing that it is Holly that shoots him. Satan needs to be given another mouth in the cold Inferno with which to chew him. 

A small note about favorite movies: My wife's most brilliant psychology professor, while lecturing about Freud, needed a copy of the movie Backdraft and asked the class if anyone owned a copy he could use. One male student responded that owned the film, and added that it was his favorite. The professor then proceeded to question the student about the movie, why he liked it,  what he liked about it, and how many times he had seen it. When the student answered (too many to count as well), the professor said something like, "all those big hoses and sprays of water." You can imagine the shame the boy felt, being so unpacked in front of the whole class with so few words. Why you would call attention to yourself in front of a man with such penetrating psychological intelligence is beyond me, especially in reference to a movie like Backdraft (which really is a bunch of men with big, flesh colored hoses spraying fires with massive jets of white water) is beyond me, but obviously that boy's love of Backdraft reflected his need to assert his masculinity, having been brought up in an effeminated, pleasure seeking regime. What The Third Man reflects about me I suppose depends on your own analysis of the film. Here's the wonderful opening of the movie, with the unknown narrator (making the movie a frame story like James' Turn of the Screw) and the actual documentary footage of the war powers policing Vienna. Enjoy.