Chilling! ( )

Vier sterren voor The Third Man en drie voor aanhangseltje The Fallen Idol.
The Third Man baadt in die heerlijke na-oorlogse spionagesfeer, deze keer Wenen, maar het had net zo goed het Berlijn van John Le Carre’s Smiley kunnen zijn. Stille straten en kille nachten, waarin je haast automatisch zelf mistbanken ziet opdoemen. Heerlijke sfeersetting, degelijke plot. Aangenaam leesvoer. ( )

I can see now that Grahan Green was right in his original decision not to put 'The Third Man' forward for publication as a novella.

My expectations going in were fairly low. I saw it as a preliminary sketch, made in isolation, in preparation for the collaborative creative effort of making what was to become a good movie. In effect, it’s a first-pass storyboard I didn't expect it to be so lifeless that I abandoned it at 35% because I was bored.

The structure of the storytelling is clumsy and ineffective. Having events curated by a policeman who is reflecting on his memories and who slides back and forth on the timeline doesn't work well. It keeps you out of the heads of the main players and keeps the action as passive recollections and the emotions as chewed-over summaries. I think it was meant to add mystery and foreshadowing but, for me, it just made the story ponderous.

The plot is wafer-thin. It's fairly obvious from the beginning who the third man is and what Role Martins' blind spot is. This might have been OK if I was invested in Rolo's search for the truth but he's a hard man to like. His only distinguishing features seem to be weakness and bad temper. His relationship with Lime seems to be one of suppressed homosexual attraction arising from an early, apparently abusive, relationship when he and Lime were at school together. He refers frequently to 'mixing his drinks' which seems to be a coded reference to his bisexuality. Lime, as seen from the policeman's eyes and Martins' shared memories, is a narcissist and a racketeer. Martins' is his long-time stooge. The story gives me no reason to care about Harry Lime. Martins' could have been drawn as the route-for-him-because-he's-loyal-and-grieving-for-a-friend under-dog but instead, he comes across as weak, broken men, thrashing around trying to sustain the fantasy of a relationship that he won't allow himself to see clearly.

Still, I didn't set the novella aside because I didn't like the characters or the plot. I put it aside because the prose limps along and I became bored. The whole thing is only 157 pages long. I should have read it in a day. Instead, I kept putting it down and then found myself reluctant to pick it up again.

My advice: skip this and watch the movie. If the movie really hooks you and you want to see what made it work, dip into this novella and see how far they came from this beginning.

Here's the trailer for the movie. It's worth watching for the camera work and the music, even before you add Orson Welles.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9yyDEDGlr0&list=PLogzKwi9H4RRI7jhBmNFwVtHZO...

It is no surprise that The Third Man as a novel remains inchoate. It is a signpost, a germinating seed carelessly pitched in frustrated haste. Where does it lead, what will grow? The film’s images travel in any reader’s bloodstream. Cotten, Howard and Welles occupy the dialogue. Greene’s descriptions are wan and undeveloped. What then can possibly pierce a contemporary reader? The crux of The Third Man is the death of loyalty. Reason and Ideology may trade blows in a makeshift ring, governed in an incomprehensible language, what matters is friendship, right? Even loyalties forged over a lifetime become suspect in the murky reality of postwar Vienna.
( )

Carol Reed’s film of The Third Man, starring Orson Welles as Harry Lime and famous for its haunting theme music played on a zither, is widely (perhaps universally) acknowledged one of the great cinematic classics. This is the book of the film – unusually, the film came first, Graham Greene expanding his screenplay to produce this novella.

Set in post-war Vienna, a city governed jointly by the victorious Allies from the Second World War. The life of the boulevardier is long gone, replaced by ultra-austerity and grim rationing. Each of the four powers controls a different section of the city and movement between the different zones, and particularly in and out of the Soviet area, is limited. Green captures the endemic melancholia marvellously: that was, after all, so often his trademark. Many of his novels are set against a context of pervasive misery and pessimism. Indeed, critics came to refer to the hinterland of gloom as ‘Greeneland’ and late 1940s Vienna fits the bill closely.

The novella is recounted by Calloway, a Scotland Yard police officer who had been sent to Vienna with the gazetted military rank of colonel. He is, however, investigating black market infractions. Rollo Martins, who struggles to make a living as the writer of hammy Westerns, is invited out to Vienna by his old school friend Harry Lime, who lures him with the offer of a job writing promotional material for a charity bringing comfort to some of the hordes of displaced persons who have been drawn to the city. Upon his arrival in Vienna, however, Martins learns that Lime had died a few days ago, and is about to be buried that very afternoon. Feeling a displaced person himself, martins speaks to some of Harry Lime’s circle of friends and acquaintances, each of whom offers a slightly different version of Harry’s death. Confused and upset, Martins’s discomfiture increases when he suddenly sees Lime, large as life, walking down the street.

The story unwinds dexterously and Martins is pulled further into the mystery as he tries to reconstruct Lime’s life in Vienna, and to explain his apparent death and subsequent reappearance. Issues of conscience and obscured morality were Greene’s speciality, fuelled by his own doubts and religious ambivalence, allowing him to capture Martin’s quandary perfectly.

I think that this is one of those rare instances where the film is better than the book, though the book is still exceptionally strong, and it certainly demonstrates Greene on top form. ( )