The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Carol Reed · a film · 1949 · about 104 minutes in the British release · written by Graham Greene · in English, with German and some Russian
Mode
Thriller of investigation turned into a fable of friendship and betrayal; city film, moral drama and dark comedy in one
Mythos
The dead man who is alive; a false burial and a true one at the same grave; the temptation on a high place and the descent beneath the city; the innocent abroad
Phase
Occupied Vienna, from a funeral to a second funeral at the same grave, framed by a spoken prologue over the city and a long walk down a cemetery avenue
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, about 104 minutes in the British release; Robert Krasker’s tilted frame, Anton Karas’s solo zither; shot largely on location in Vienna, its sewers among it, with studio work in London
Register
From a parrot and a literary lecture to murder in a sewer; a dance tune over all of it, never changing key
Scale
Two friends, one woman, a divided city and its black market
Governing Proposition
An American writer of westerns comes to occupied Vienna to work for his friend Harry Lime and is told that Harry is dead. Inquiring into the death, he finds Harry alive and selling diluted penicillin, agrees to help trap him, and shoots him in the sewers beneath the city, and the woman who loved Harry walks past him without a look. The wager of the film is that a thriller’s method, its frame tilted off the level and its score a single café zither, can make a man’s charm felt before it is judged, and can show that in a city where everything is traded evil becomes a matter of distance, and that the hero’s clarity is itself compromised while the woman’s loyalty to a guilty man is not condemned.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a voice over a city. Carol Reed himself speaks the prologue, “I never knew the old Vienna before the war”, over a montage of the city as it stands in 1949: divided among four occupying powers, in ruins, living on its black market. The voice is easy and wry, and the tone it sets holds for the whole film: lightness over something rotten. Through all of it plays a single zither, a dance tune.
Reed directed and produced it for London Films, and Alexander Korda and David O. Selznick presented it. Graham Greene wrote the screenplay from his own story, written first as a prose treatment and published in 1950. Robert Krasker photographed it, Oswald Hafenrichter cut it, and the score is Anton Karas’s, for solo zither. It was shot largely on location in occupied Vienna, the sewers among it, with studio work in London, in black and white, in English with German and some Russian that the film leaves untranslated. Behind it stood Reed’s Odd Man Out, a wounded man’s last night in a city, and The Fallen Idol, which had already joined him to Greene. The British release runs about 104 minutes; the American release, prepared for Selznick, ran about 93, with Joseph Cotten’s voice in place of Reed’s.
Holly Martins, played by Cotten, an American who writes westerns, arrives to work for his friend Harry Lime and is told that Harry has been killed by a car. Harry’s funeral follows, and with it Major Calloway of the military police, played by Trevor Howard, and his sergeant, Paine, played by Bernard Lee. Holly, whose trade is the hero of the western, begins to ask how his friend died.
Movement II
Holly makes his inquiries. He sees Baron Kurtz, played by Ernst Deutsch, Popescu, played by Siegfried Breuer, and Dr Winkel, played by Erich Ponto. He meets Anna Schmidt, played by Alida Valli, who loved Harry. And he hears the porter, played by Paul Hörbiger, whose account of the accident has one man too many in it: three men carried the body, and the third is unaccounted for. The film’s title is a gap in a story, a man no one will name.
Meanwhile Holly is mistaken for a novelist: Crabbin of the British Council, played by Wilfrid Hyde-White, takes him for one, and there is to be a lecture. The porter is murdered, a child, Hansl, accuses Holly, and Holly is chased. At the lecture he is asked about James Joyce. A parrot bites him. He takes a taxi ride for an abduction. The comedy makes one point many times: the writer of westerns is out of his depth in an old city where nothing is what it is called.
The form is an investigation, and the viewer is kept in it beside Holly, learning what he learns when he learns it. The camera is tilted off the level, scene after scene, until the tilt stops being an effect and becomes the condition of the place. Karas’s zither plays over murder and comedy alike, light and dancing, without changing key. The film is making a world before it reveals the man at the centre of it.
Movement III
Calloway shows Holly the evidence. Harry has been selling diluted penicillin, and Calloway takes Holly to the children it has harmed, whom the film keeps off screen. The friend Holly has been defending has crippled children for money. Holly’s errand of loyalty is over, and the viewer learns the truth about Harry before seeing him at all.
At night, in a dark street, a cat sits at a man’s shoes in a doorway. A light goes on in a window across the street and falls on his face: Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles, alive, with a half smile. Then the light goes, and he is gone. It is the most famous entrance in the film and one of the great revelations in cinema, and it is the entrance of a man the viewer already knows to be guilty. The charm is felt before it can be judged, and the judgment has already been made.
The coffin is opened, and it is empty. The dead man is alive, and the first burial was false. Everything the film has built so far, the investigation, the porter’s third man, the tilted streets, turns on the moment in the doorway, and the form has withheld Harry until then so that his face lands with its full weight.
Movement IV
Holly meets Harry at the Prater and they ride the great wheel together. From the top, the people below are dots. Harry asks whether Holly would feel pity “if one of those dots stopped moving”, and makes him an offer, a share. The scene is a temptation on a high place, the tempter showing the world below and offering a part of it, and Harry is easy and persuasive throughout.
Before they part Harry makes the speech that runs from the Borgias and the Renaissance to “the cuckoo clock”. The best speech in the film is given to the villain. The film lets the charm stand at full strength, so that what Holly does next costs him something.
He agrees to be the bait for Calloway’s trap, in exchange for Anna’s safe passage. Anna refuses the bargain. She knows what Harry is, and she will not be freed by his betrayal. Holly’s clarity is not innocent: he betrays his friend partly for a woman, and the woman holds to the friend. The film will not say she is wrong.
Movement V
The trap is laid at a café, and from it the chase goes down into the sewers beneath the city. It is built from echo, running water and torchlight. Harry is trapped. His fingers come up through a grating in the street above. Holly shoots him. The descent beneath the city ends where the dead man is finally killed, and the friend kills the friend.
Harry is buried a second time, at the same grave, and this time the burial is true. After it, in a long take down the cemetery avenue, the leaves falling, Anna walks toward the camera. Holly stands at the side of the avenue. She walks past him without a glance, and he lights a cigarette. The ending refuses the reunion, and it delivers Anna’s verdict in duration alone, one of the coldest endings of its decade.
The film won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1949, and Krasker won the Academy Award for black-and-white cinematography. Karas’s theme became a hit record around the world. In 1999 the British Film Institute’s poll placed it first among the British films of the century. The divided European city became the setting of the Cold War thriller, and the tilted frame passed into the grammar of suspense. What the film holds is harder than its fame: a charm that is the instrument of evil, a hero whose clarity has a price, and a woman who walks past him.
Act III · The Twelve
Run the subtractive test and the spine holds. The first funeral is required by the last. The porter’s account of a third man is the hinge of the investigation, and his murder turns inquiry into danger. The penicillin evidence must come before the doorway, so that the most charming entrance in the film is that of a man known to have harmed children. The wheel is where the friendship is tested and refused; Anna’s refusal of Holly’s bargain prepares the last shot. What gives is the comedy. The lecture and its questions about James Joyce, the parrot that bites Holly and the taxi ride he takes for an abduction each make one point, that Holly is out of his depth. The tone needs some of it, not all.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds. In a city where everything is traded, evil becomes a matter of distance: from the top of the wheel people are dots, and Harry asks whether Holly would feel pity “if one of those dots stopped moving”. The film shows a charm that is the instrument of that evil, and a friendship that cannot survive knowing it. Under it lies a harder truth: Holly’s clarity is not innocent, since he betrays his friend partly for a woman, and the woman holds to Harry knowing what he is, and the film will not say she is wrong. Held at the bar because much of what the film is loved for is atmosphere, and the black market is shown as a mood more than as a mechanism.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The elevation is frequent and of several kinds. Harry’s appearance in the doorway, a cat at his shoes, light thrown across the street onto his face and the half smile before the light goes, is one of the great revelations in cinema. The wheel lifts two men above the city to look down at it, a high place in the old sense. The sewer chase is dread built from echo, water and torchlight, ending in fingers through a grating. The last shot, down the cemetery avenue as the leaves fall, is the summit and one of the coldest endings of its decade. The empty tilted streets keep the height between. Held below the top because some of it is elevation of style rather than of feeling.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The myth is built. A dead man who is alive; a first burial that is false and a second that is true, at the same graveside; a descent under the city to the place where the dead man is finally killed; a temptation on a high place, where the tempter shows the world below and offers a share in it. The structure bears it: without the empty coffin and the sewer there is no film. The innocent abroad, a writer of westerns lost in an old city, is played against his own genre. The particular stays particular: penicillin, a cat, a parrot, a zither. Held below the top because the archetype is partly carried by style and by Welles’s presence, and drawn in strokes rather than worked through.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is the thriller and the dark crime film of the 1940s, and Reed’s own path: Odd Man Out (1947) had already made a wounded man’s last night in a city into expressionist pursuit, and The Fallen Idol (1948) had already joined Reed and Greene. Location shooting in real ruins was neorealism’s, and the canted frame was not new. The departures are real and cost something: a whole score for one café zither, against every convention of the thriller; the best speech given to the villain and the hero made a fool; an ending that refuses the reunion; the tilt made a governing law. Held below the bar because the turn is a wager placed on paths already proven, combined with great force.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The investigation is the form of disillusion: the viewer learns who Harry is by a thriller’s method, as Holly does, so the charm is felt before it is judged, and the doorway lands only because the form has withheld him. The tilted frame is the knowledge that this world is off its axis, held so long that the viewer stops noticing. The zither, light and dancing over murder, is the city’s charm sounding over its rot. The last long take carries Anna’s verdict in duration alone. The cost: the comic set pieces sit in the form as relief rather than as instruments, and some of the style decorates rather than knows.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Seventy-seven years of return are evidence, and the film yields chiefly in two ways. Formally, the photography, the cutting of the sewer chase, the use of sound and the last long take are studied without end. Morally, the triangle grows harder with each viewing: Holly’s betrayal looks less like heroism, Anna’s loyalty less like blindness, and Calloway’s way of showing Holly the children colder. It has been read as the end of the special relationship, as a Catholic fable of grace refused, as the city’s own portrait. What holds the axis: the readings largely converge, once the triangle is seen the meaning stands open, and the literature leans toward the making and the legend.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Released in 1949, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1940s. The force is a synthesis, not a reorganisation: postwar location realism, an expressionist camera and a score that broke the thriller’s conventions, carried to a finish its sources did not reach. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1949; Karas’s theme a hit record around the world; the ruined or divided European city as the setting of the Cold War thriller; the canted frame passed into the common grammar of suspense; first place in the British Film Institute’s poll of 1999. It perfected a manner more than it redirected the field: its successors borrowed its look, and few changed what they did because of it.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The British release survives complete, and the shorter American version prepared for Selznick is a variant that takes nothing from it. Presence has been continuous for seventy-seven years, in repertory and in teaching, and beyond the cinema: the zither theme is still known to people who have not seen the film. Four-power Vienna and its black market are 1949, and the film is about what 1949 had done to Europe, so they age as history, not as fashion; the moral question has not aged. The print and the mono sound are of their period, the smallest charge. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it. Seventy-seven years of continuous presence would carry more, and the medium’s span holds the figure at 8.8.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares, with invention left to The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition. The making bears weight throughout. Robert Krasker lights wet cobbles from low and behind and tilts the frame to a degree that varies with the moral weather. Reed directs a mixed cast across several languages with a thriller’s timing at every turn. Greene’s script is economical and dry, with lines that have passed into common speech; Welles’s few minutes take the film without unbalancing it; Oswald Hafenrichter cuts the sewer chase; Karas’s zither carries a whole film alone. The costs: the comic set pieces are broad and slack, Cotten is sometimes stiff where Holly needs to be foolish, and a few tilted frames are mannered.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Crabbin’s lecture, with its questions about James Joyce, and the sewer where one friend shoots another. One law governs both: a city where everything is traded and nothing is what it is called, played to a dance tune. The lecture is a gentle fraud, Holly taken for a novelist; the black market a murderous one, penicillin diluted and sold as cure; the funerals are false and then true; the zither plays over all of it without changing key. No one stands outside the tilted world, not even the hero. The strain is in the comedy, which at its broadest obeys the law of gaiety over rot only loosely, and in Holly, who wavers between fool and conscience.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The orders held in one structure: friendship and its betrayal; love, unrequited and unchanged; the state, in four occupying powers, a military police and the threat of repatriation to the Soviet sector; crime and its market; medicine, in the penicillin and the children’s ward; history, in a defeated city’s ruins and Harry’s talk of the Borgias and the Renaissance; art, in Holly’s westerns against literary culture; death and its rites, in two funerals at one grave. What holds it lowest: consciousness is rendered from outside, chiefly through Holly’s actions; Anna’s inner life is withheld by design; labour, the family and nature are nearly absent; the sacred is a cemetery, not a belief. It is a thriller’s scope, carried to the edge of what a thriller can hold.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.0, then The Imperishable at 8.8, and The Sublime and The Inner Law at 8.7. A making in which photography, script, cutting, a few minutes of Welles and a single instrument each bear weight; seventy-seven years of continuous presence, the zither still known beyond the cinema; elevation at the doorway, the wheel, the sewer and the avenue; and one law of trade and false names, played to a dance tune, from the lecture hall to the sewer.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8: friendship, love, the state, crime, medicine, history, art and death are held through one investigation, but consciousness is rendered from outside, labour, the family and nature are nearly absent, and the sacred is a cemetery. Above it, The Swerve and The Bottomless Well at 8.3, then The Inevitable and Pressure on Tradition at 8.4: a wager placed on paths already proven; readings that converge once the triangle is seen; comedy that makes one point several times; and a manner perfected more than a field redirected.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Unconcealment meets it exactly at 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 and The Swerve at 8.3 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.3, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. The work is held below the summit by two conditions, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition under the 8.5 the Epochal Gate requires, and by its aggregate, 8.5 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The Third Man as released in Britain in September 1949, about 104 minutes, black and white, from Reed’s spoken prologue over the Vienna montage to Anna’s walk down the cemetery avenue: directed and produced by Carol Reed for London Films, presented by Alexander Korda and David O. Selznick, written by Graham Greene from his own story, photographed by Robert Krasker, edited by Oswald Hafenrichter, with music by Anton Karas for solo zither. The British version survives complete and is the film as its maker released it; it is the version judged. The American release prepared for Selznick, about 93 minutes, with Joseph Cotten’s voice in place of Reed’s in the prologue and some cuts, is a variant and is not judged. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. The film is in English, with German and some Russian that it leaves untranslated, and none of that is rendered here. Greene’s story, published in 1950, is not part of the work. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, in three short fragments. Facts that could not be verified, among them the exact day of release, the contents of the American cuts, the authorship of particular lines, the producers’ precise roles, who preferred which ending, the state of restorations, and the radio and television series that followed, are not given.