A Film Canon

The Third Man fulfils Odd Man Out's ambition to rotate a cityscape ninety degrees, deflecting the claustrophobia engendered by the division of post-war Vienna into a potentially infinite vertical plane, with the result that every movement made by Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) in search of his friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) takes on the character of a descent, as evinced in the proliferation of staircases and other agents of vertical movement, as well as the omnipresence of rubble and ruin, which, in turn, imbues every space with a subterranean quality, reinforced by Reed and cinematographer Joseph Lasker's brilliant proclivity for shooting at night. Similarly, Reed ensures that virtually every shot is taken from an (increasingly) tilted camera, or internalises that perspective in its composition - a poetic contrast to the panoramic horizons of the pulp Westerns for which Martins is renowned - as well as gravitating towards those extreme high- and low-angles that reiterate the pervasive vertical axis. This alternately identifies the viewer with Martins' charismatic drunkenness, the plethora of insane children produced by Lime's rogue penicillin trade, and the reputedly childlike character of Lime himself ("He never grew up...the world grew up around him and buried him"), whose part is relatively minor - a mere personification of that connective urban tissue thrown into traumatic relief by the war, against which the consistently empty public thoroughfares are set, their desolation the index both of a rotated vanishing-point, and an elusive, threatening presence that exudes complicity, epitomised by the moment at which Martins appears to be kidnapped, only to be escorted to an event at which he has agreed to speak. That said, Welles' influence is palpable, most notably in the reinforcement of this pervasive disorientation with a reification of language that finds expression both in the multilingual dialogue (roughly a third of which is in Russian, French or German), as well as all the characters' mild tendency to speak at, or past, each other - a cacaphony of disembodied, zither-inflected sounds that finds its logical conclusion either in the animal realm (dogs, cockatoos, rhinoceroses), or in those transgressions that don't admit of articulation at all (Lime's homosexual colleagues).