Nineteen Forty-Nine was a great year for movies, one that earned the ad of a decade later that “movies were better than ever”. Laurence Olivier’s “Hamlet” won the Best Oscar, the awards trying to believe that the most quality movies were also the most popular, but the year also included the musical “On the Town”, a blockbuster musical by the young people of Comden and Green and Leonard Bernstein, “Pinkie”, which was about a mulatto girl trying to live in the South that showed some of the sorrows of segregation, “The Treasure of Sierra Madre”, which was a story as tightly drawn as a Chaucer story, and even the awful “My Friend Irma”, remarkable only because it introduced Martin and Lewis, who stole the show with Martin’s suave deliveries, including his signature ability to caress the microphone, and Jerry Lewis, who was not so much imitating a cripple as much as imitating a nerd before there was such a term. It seems that the movies had moved on beyond World War II to pick up the new issues of the post-war world, such as suburbanization in “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” which was produced in 1948, and even in the 1949 and wonderfully comic “I Was a Male War Bride”, where the women were seen as independent minded and responsible and sensible. Cary Grant was the comic foil to Ann Southern’s straight man, the opposite of Burns and Allen, a duo from the era of the Thirties, where Allen was a ditzie foil.. Movies were into social issues, such as the overdrawn “Gentleman’s Agreement”. The weekly movie goer didn’t need to read the papers. Those who tuned into the dream factory had plenty of real issues to chew on. The major studios were at work with socially significent stuff, not just with film noir detective and crime stories that portrayed dark emotions shot mostly at night, such as “The Postman Rings Twice” or “Sorry, Wrong Number”, the genre seeming profound because the protagonists were quirky as well as bad. (But, then again, “Richard III” would qualify as a film noir piece.)
One movie that stands out even among these of the period is Carol Reed’s “The Third Man”, produced in England by Carol Reed and authored by Graham Greene but a movie that is made by and for Orson Welles, who stars in it, as well as Joseph Cotten, who had been one of his players in some earlier of his films with Wells. The theme was not the social conditions that lead to evil, as had been the case in so many of the films I have mentioned. Rather, it was the inherent and permanent nature of evil, something fitting for Greene’s Catholicism, usually conjoined by him to inevitably deserved guilt, something familiar in Welles because of his familiarity with Shakespeare. That raises existential issues to be considered by a popular audience a decade before it became the rage. The setting is placed in post war Vienna, one of the films often portraying the ravaged Europe, filled with Berlin rubble, people living in ruins, making as best they can to do what they can, selling information and black market items and their own bodies so that they could survive. It was not at all clear that Europe would emerge out of the carnage. But in “The Third Man” there is again the treatment of these souls as being bad rather than merely lost, a place and theme and emotion used by Billy Wilder did when Marlene Dietrich is played as the ex-Nazi in “A Foriegn Affair”, from 1948, a movie that misstepped because it is not as funny as it ought to be because there are so many deadly reverberations concerning what had occurred so few years before, and where what remains of the movie is moralistic, as if Wilder, who never elsewhere was, had eased up by doing Stanley Kramer in “Judgement at Neurenberg”. Rather, in “The Third Man”, everyone is secretive and suspicious as a stereotypical naive American comes to the funeral of his friend, Orson Welles’ Harry Lime, but the facts don’t add up and the Joseph Cotton character, Holly Martins, pursues to see what he can discover, which is that Lime had faked his death so that he can escape from arrest by the British occupation officers who are hounding him for having sold fake penicillin to refugee children and others. It is an evil world and Martins should go back to his soft berth.
The impact of the movie is mostly its atmosphere rather than its plot. There is the musical theme set to a zither, an exotic and eerie musical instrument that, for a moment, caught up the public attention. There are the settings, which are overdressed and cluttered Vienna apartments, and also a bit of Vienna rubble, but largely the faces, their European shapes, which makes them overly polite and suspicious and ominous, and makes Martin think that their German language disguises what they want to hide, the language necessarily ominous, as well as the European adage that people should not mess into business that is not tier concern. Americans, on the other hand, blunder everywhere, especially in that Martins is a writer of Western novels.There are camera angles at odd angles that are reminiscent of Welles as a director, and there is a spectacular scene where Welles meets Cotten at a ferris wheel, as dazzling as the one during which, in “Citizen Kane” a crane moves up in a single shot from the auditorium to higher and higher levels of the opera house, the singer getting ever so faint and the workmen coming to realize that the singer, who is Kane’s wife, is just not very good. When Welles and Cotton pause at the top of the ferris wheel in “The Third Man”, Lime looks down to say that the people are just ants and so what happens to their lives doesn't matter. This is nihilism put in an image. Further, there is the lighting of the night time streets, which are illuminated well enough so that their cobblestones and heavy architecture are clear even if it is at night, giving off its visual eeriness and ominous intent as people evade until they cannot reveal the heart of darkness. And there is the face of Orson Welles, still handsome and always charming. His face is so expressive as he tries to escape in the sewers of Vienna that you halfway hope that he would make his escape, whatever evil he had done.
The theme of the movie is that part of Europe is, for a time, hopelessly corrupt and compromised, one exception being Lime’s girlfriend, who has the excuse of loving her and not knowing what Lime had done, and another being Trevor Howard as the British military officer trying to get to clean out the stables of corruption, greed, fear, and the stench of evil. This postwar Vienna is an image of how the world could become evil, a quintessence of evil, and so a reminder of what Graham Greene says lies in the heart, whether or not that condition can be rectified. What “The Third Man” does is repackage the stereotypical characters such as the naive American, the love interest, the evil person behind the scenes, the skeptical police agent, and a host of attending unscrupulous characters, the worst of a Greek chorus, into the tragic telling of evil conquering good, partly because he has a soft spot for his old friend and so Lime does not eliminate him, Lime having to die so as to end the pestilence, which is much to his pity, as an Elizabethan might say, which is the kind of play it is.
But what is left of that Old World? This is not the world of the Third Reich, which still remains a mystery to decipher, as attested by the many new books published even now by its historians, some seventy five years after the War ended. What of its aftermath, when Europe is defeated, without an economy, and with barely a few souls but a lot of riffraff? What are we to remember and learn from the post-war period, even if the world was redeemed?
First, the redemption. The five years after the war saw constant strikes in France, continued poverty in England, and starvation in Germany. But the conditions of Western Europe were deplorable and yet not irredeemable. Twenty years later, there had been a German “miracle” and similar economic growths in all of western Europe, and today show the European Union as one of the three great economic and political powers along with China and the United States, Russia, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the expansion of Europe restored to its ^ussian boundaries. So there was no dissolution, but triumph. It is hard to see any time in Europe when it has been as peaceful as it has been since maybe ever. So, contrary to the spirit of Greene, who never said that Austria and the rest of Europe would not rebound, who thought that there was just a cesspool of European evil, there was just the dislocation of a transition between the loss of the devastation of war and the resurgence of economic and political functions and the well plushed lives that go with it.
America had played its role in shoring up Europe with the Marshall Plan and NATO. Yes, there were a great many difficult domestic issues in the United States in the late Forties. These include segregation, strikes, poor farm prices, and the anti-Communist Crusade that led right wingers to try to find something to oppose now that America Firsters had been stymied by Pearl Harbor. But remember the positive things: government financed mortgages, the gI Bill of rights and Harry Truman deciding to recognize Israel as a moral obligation in the wake of the Holocaust even though George Marshall’s Thucydidean doctrine was that it would lead to no end of troubles, as it did. Morality was already moving to morality with issues of segregation, Truman integrating the armed forces, and increases in wages for everyone.
And then go back to those movies of the late Forties that I have alluded to. They were all about making things better: more prosperous, more humane. That may seem to be superficial, liberal platitudes compared to the psychological depths of Greene and his sophisticated Catholic theology, with the centrality of original sin as explaining what individuals and nations do. The world is too complicated to understand it otherwise as deeply religious.
But the supposedly superficial world view of liberal secularism, as opposed to some enlightened Christianity, worked to make the world get restored and work to newer goals, while Catholicism, whether in Greene’s version or in that of others, had to mightily work out of its anti-Semitism, as it did in the Sixties, but retained to today with its obsession with authority, and with the quagmire of the sexual issues that plague Catholicism in both the clergy because of its abuses and with the laity because they are suspect of the ban on contraception. I am thinking also of a not very good movie that was really just a documentary about the Berlin Airlift, where a fictional crew flies supplies to the very real needs in West Berlin. “The Big Lift” was made in 1950 to picture the events of two years before when Stalin would not allow supplies to travel by road through Eastern Germany so as to supply the surrounded city. It was a practical matter solved through technology and organization and it did much more than provide food and feel so that the enclave would not be absorbed into Soviet Germany. It made Germans come to think of the Americans as their friends, giving food to children. The more humane way was also the politic way and that is a motto that should last however much the United States dallies in its Machaeivellian Kissingerian ways.