The Third Man

Comparative · 2027 & 2028 Leaving Cert

Carol Reed’s The Third Man is set in a city cut into four zones by four armies, and every shot is built around that division. It is the best film on the course for showing how a place can shape what people are willing to do.

The film was released in 1949, from a screenplay by Graham Greene, and shot on location in a Vienna still full of bomb sites. After the war the city was divided between the American, British, French and Soviet powers, with the old centre patrolled jointly, and that arrangement is not background detail. It is the plot. Nobody has authority everywhere, so a man who knows the map can live in the gaps.

It is on the comparative list for 2027 and 2028, and it is usually taken for Cultural Context, though it works just as well for Literary Genre because of how openly the camera comments on the story.

The Third Man: The Story in Five Beats

One. Holly Martins, an American writer of cheap westerns, arrives in Vienna broke, having been offered a job by his old school friend Harry Lime. He gets there in time to be told Harry was killed by a car outside his own building, and to attend the funeral.

Two. Major Calloway of the British military police tells Holly that Harry was a racketeer and advises him to go home. Holly, offended, decides to prove him wrong and starts asking questions.

Three. The witnesses do not agree. Two men carried the body, or three men did. The porter who mentions a third man is murdered before he can repeat it. Holly meets Anna Schmidt, Harry’s girlfriend, a Czech actress living in Vienna on forged papers.

Four. Calloway shows Holly what the racket actually was: stolen penicillin, diluted and sold on the black market, given to sick children in a hospital ward where it caused meningitis, paralysis and death. Holly goes to look at the ward.

Five. Harry is alive. He staged the funeral and lives in the sewers, moving between zones underground. He and Holly meet on the Great Wheel in the Prater, Harry offers his justification, and Holly agrees to help the police. The chase ends in the sewers, and Harry asks Holly to finish it.

A City With No Single Authority

Vienna in this film is not a setting, it is the mechanism. Four occupying powers, four sectors, one shared inner city, and a sewer system that runs underneath all of it without checkpoints. Harry’s business only works because a criminal can step across a line that police cannot.

The visual language matches. Reed shoots street after street at a tilt, so doorways lean and pavements slope, and he lights the ruins so that half of every frame is black. The zither score is the other half of the effect: a light, plinking dance tune playing over rubble and corpses, which keeps the film from settling into any single tone.

Charm Doing the Work of an Argument

Harry Lime appears on screen for about ten minutes and dominates the film. The doorway shot is the reason: a cat at his feet, a light coming on across the square, and Orson Welles standing there smiling before he vanishes. The film has spent an hour building a monster and then presents an old friend.

The scene on the Great Wheel is where the moral argument happens, and Harry makes it in the flattest terms possible. He opens the carriage door at the top of the ride, points at the people below, and turns them into arithmetic.

“Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?”Harry Lime, on the Great Wheel

Then he sets a price per dot, and follows it with the speech about the Borgias and the Renaissance that ends with a shrug about Switzerland.

“and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”Harry Lime, on the Great Wheel

Note that the film does not answer him with a speech. It answers him with the hospital ward, which Holly walks through in near silence, and with the shot of a child’s teddy bear.

Loyalty That Costs Somebody Else

Holly’s problem is that he cannot hold two ideas at once: that Harry was his friend and that Harry did this. Every time he chooses, he hurts the person nearest to him. He informs on Harry to save children he has never met, and in doing so he destroys Anna, whose forged papers he has effectively traded for.

Anna is the only character in the film who never wavers, and it is worth noticing what her constancy is worth to her: she would rather be deported to the Soviet zone than help catch him. Her walk down the avenue in the final shot, straight past Holly without a glance, is one of the most quietly brutal endings in cinema.

What the Camera Is Doing

Three techniques carry most of a Literary Genre answer. The tilted Dutch angles, which begin almost immediately and get steeper as Holly loses his footing. The chiaroscuro lighting, where figures are reduced to silhouettes and shadows are longer than the people casting them. And the sewer chase, shot with wet stone and reflected torchlight so the ground itself looks unstable.

Then the last shot, which Reed fought the producers to keep. A long, static, wide take of a bare avenue, leaves blowing, Anna walking towards the camera and out of frame while Holly waits. No music swell, no reconciliation, no line of dialogue.

Who’s Who

Holly Martins is a hack novelist who thinks life works like his own books. He is out of his depth from the first scene and does the right thing at the worst possible cost.

Harry Lime is charming, funny and responsible for a hospital ward of damaged children. The film’s real trick is that we like him too.

Anna Schmidt is an actress on forged Austrian papers, wanted by the Soviets, in love with a man she knows is guilty.

Major Calloway is patient, unglamorous and right about everything from his first scene.

The porter and Baron Kurtz are the two versions of an ordinary person under occupation: one who tells the truth and is killed for it, and one who adapts.

Using This in the Exam

How to use it: Work from three sequences: the doorway reveal, the Great Wheel, and the final avenue. Describe what is on the screen in your own words, including camera angle and lighting, and keep any dialogue to a single short line. For Cultural Context, keep tying points back to the four-zone division, because almost every choice a character makes in this film is shaped by which sector they are standing in.

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