Over the course of the last three or four years, it's been a practice of orthodoxy for me to screen
The Third Man for my classes (I teach English at a community college in Upstate, New York). While I'm certain that--with some thought and effort--I could find some educational justification for showing the film to a bunch of largely disinterested 101 students, I will readily admit that I do so for purely selfish reasons. I never tire of
The Third Man. The movie's use of light and shadow, of apocalyptic setting and highly expressive camerawork represent some of the finest moments in post-war cinema; and so too the screenplay by Graham Greene; and so too Anton Karas' spare score. But it's the performances that make the film. Everyone from the world-weary and heartbroken Anna (played by Valli), to the dogged Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), to the muscular yet gentle Sargent Paine (Bernard Lee), to the evasive and Machiavellian Harry Lime (Orson Welles) contribute to the film's psychological depth. But the movie belongs to Joseph Cotten's Holly Martins. This is another stunning turn by one of Hollywood's most overlooked actors. A man who, whether playing a serial kill (
Shadow of a Doubt), a cuckolded husband (
Niagara), or the voice of Charles Foster Kane's conscience
(Citizen Kane), excelled at understatement. And Cotten's looks are part and parcel of his craft. While he occasionally had a romantic lead (opposite Joan Fontaine in
September Affair and Marilyn Monroe (!) in
Niagara), all his roles are celebrations of a poetic average-ness, of the non-descript. His are the bodies and faces most of us possess and occupy: not a virtue valued in contemporary, mainstream cinema.
