ABSTRACT
There are two long-delayed payoffs in Carol Reed’s classic lm noir, The Third Man (1949): the bravura entrance of Orson Welles as the back-fromthe-dead, Mephistophelean charmer Harry Lime against the backdrop of the ruins of the Prater Wheel in Vienna, and the even longer awaited descent into the sewers of Vienna, scene of the nal pursuit and extermination of Lime. To be sure, the postwar Vienna in which the entire lm takes place is introduced and consistently lmed as a strange space, from Reed’s trademark tilted camera angles, to the crumbling ruins of the old imperial city, to the sordid details of the black-marketeering plot. Graham Greene’s screenplay milks the setting for all of its disorientating possibilities, playing up the cowboy naiveté of American abroad Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) to create an existential drama of a world radically destabilized by a cataclysmic world war. Nevertheless, we are primed throughout the lm to experience Lime and the sewers as something even stranger, simultaneously the resolution and the intensication of the lm’s thematics. In the rst instance, it is the character that makes the space strange. When Harry Lime boards the Prater Wheel with his old friend Holly Martins, and they climb high above the streets of Vienna to restage Jesus’ Temptation on the Mount, we nd a devil who transforms whatever space he is in into an underworld, seducing us with the chilling yet persuasive amorality of his logic. It is only once truly underground, however, that Lime is stripped of the veneer of supernatural invincibility, revealed as a cornered rat, dangerous but pitiful, trapped by the space he had long made his own (Figure 15.1).
