The Third Man

Robert Krasker, BSC

Directed by Carol Reed, The Third Man comes near to being the perfect British film. And why shouldn't it be? It was specially written by Graham Greene, produced by Alexander Korda and David O. Selznick, had additional dialogue by Orson Welles, and was photographed by legendary cameraman Robert Krasker. With all of these geniuses on the job, the situation certainly could have become a classic example of "too many cooks," but the recipe came out just right. The picture was made almost entirely in Vienna, a city shattered by war, but it couldn't have been more smoothly done if it had been shot under studio conditions.

Krasker was born in Perth, Australia, studied art in Paris, and learned the business at Korda's studio in London. He gained international renown for several postwar English pictures, Henry V, Caesar and Cleopatra, Brief Encounter and Odd Man Out. Then came The Third Man, for which he received an Academy Award for black-and-white cinematography. The picture won the Grand Prix for the best feature film at the 1949 Cannes Film Festival.

Vienna is seen by day and night as Holly (Joseph Cotten), an American pulp writer, searches for clues to the death of his friend, Harry Lime (Welles). He is unable to find the third witness to the death, and eventually learns that the third man was Lime — who had another man killed in his place, and is alive and flourishing as a black marketeer. After many twists of plot, Holly kills Lime.

Some of the best-remembered scenes occur in daylight. One is the meeting of Holly and Lime at the Prater amusement park, where they talk in a car on the world's largest Ferris wheel. Another is the last scene in the picture, a long take in which Holly waits for Lime's former mistress (Alida Valli) — the woman he loves — on a straight road stretching to infinity between rows of bomb-ravaged trees. She walks past without speaking, and the scene captures perfectly the desolation of the spurned lover.

The most wildly imaginative images were filmed night-for-night, using hard light (supposedly from streetlamps), high contrast and numerous side tilts of the camera. The streets are generally unpopulated except by the principals, and the city serves as a giant stage for the actors, who sometimes cast great shadows on the pockmarked walls. The doorways are black, and one gets the feeling that unseen menace lurks in all of them. So it does: in one of cinema's most famous "reveals," we see the toes of a man's shoes jutting out of just such a shadow, and when someone opens a door across the street, the light falls upon a smirking Harry Lime.

Best of all are scenes photographed in the vast sewers of Vienna, where military police from the four occupying nations try to capture Lime. Weird lighting effects and numerous Dutch angles give the long sequence an expressionist ambience. A high point in the sequence is a strange street-level shot in which the fugitive tries to lift a manhole cover and his fingers, thrusting through and into the night, resemble the tentacles of a starfish.

The camera operators on this classic show were Edward Scaife, BSC and Denys Coop, BSC, and some additional photography was done by John Wilcox, BSC and Stan Pavey, BSC.

—G.T.

© 1999 ASC