Set In The Third Person.

Having just watched the 1949 British Film Noir, The Third Man, this complex, intriguing, and highly stylish film has still much to tell us about the complexities of the human condition, and how this can be (mis)shaped through want, greed, and deception.

Directed by Carol Reed, written by Graham Greene, and starring Orson Wells, the movie is set in a bleak post-WW2 Vienna, a place of bomb-damaged grandeur and seedy settings of black marketeering. It is dramatically shot in an expressionist black and white style, with ‘Dutch’ slanted framing and scored throughout by Zither music, that is simultaneously cheery and disquieting.

The setting of Vienna as a once magnificent capital city that has seen the end of an old order, and now a place of weary cynicism, hardship, illicit dealings and emergent Cold-War espionage, is profound. The polarisation of sordid poverty and purloined prosperity provides a precarious space in between where behavior and morals are as damaged and compromised as the architecture in the semi-ruined city.

Yet, as a metaphor the city seems to connect us to a contemporary setting in which the ‘sovereignty’ of neo-liberalist capitalism may also be seen to belong to an old, or deteriorating order and existence. In the film, we see Vienna as a framework in which the leading characters all individually struggle within the very symbolism of the film – the high-contrast black and white photography; the dark and light settings; the arresting elevated views from the Ferris wheel, and the underworld of the city sewer system set against the street level. These all play off ambiguous notions of idealism, personal and monetary survival, and a swinging pendulum of human integrity, if not quite as convenient as good versus bad.

These characteristics can also be seen to chime with a current condition of fashion, and the awkwardness it now faces confronting its reflection in its own dressing mirror.

With regard to issues of market forces, commercial enterprise, acquisition, gratuitous consumption and environmental responsibility, the central character of Harry Lime, played by Welles, is felicitous. Lime is considered a responsible and honest entrepreneur, friend and lover, supposedly knocked down by a car whilst crossing the street, and collectively mourned at his funeral. Instead, he is gradually revealed as dishonest, deceitful, exploitative, and certainly responsible for manslaughter, if not quite murder.

Lime may correspondingly represent for us changing perceptions of the fashion business. His character epitomizes and exemplifies the complex paradox evidenced by an industry that has for so long been championed as a positive and prominent component of culture, whilst furtively embodying inequity, turpitude for the environment, and the many exploited peoples within it.

In the end, pursued by those he once loved or admired, Lime meets his end in the sewers, his own domain. The ending, not especially a happy one, is brighter but still fairly ambiguous. It leaves the viewer with the restless perception that none of the main characters get to leave Vienna – this skewed city, as awry as the film’s camera angles.

It’s such an absorbing and layered film, with much to enjoy, and much to think about on many levels.