The Third Man (1949)is a very interesting collaboration of director Carol Reed, screenwriter Graham Greene, and actor Orson Welles. Greene did not want to write a screenplay directly but rather first wrote a novella from which he then wrote the screenplay. With the zither music of Anton Karas as background, the film tells of Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), an American writer of pulp westerns, who comes to post-Second World War Vienna to work for his friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) whom he has not seen for nine or ten years. Martins finds that Lime was killed by a truck and attends his funeral but the circumstances of his death seem strange. Two men supposedly carried his body after he was killed by a car, but a mysterious third man was also seen. Martins meets Lime’s lover Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli), an actress, and friends of his in order to find out what really happened.
In part, this can be seen as the story of a purportedly innocent American getting caught up in European intrigue and decadence. Despite warnings from more than one person, Martins decides to probe what actually happened rather than leave well enough alone. As a result, Lime, a black marketeer in penicillin whose diluting of the medicine has resulted in deaths and injuries, is found to be alive and is eventually punished In addition, though. Martins inadvertently causes the deaths of two innocents. Was Martins’ crusade worth it? Do good intentions make up for what may be ignorant recklessness? It is hard to say.
Another aspect of the film relates to the relative importance of virtue. The British military policeman Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) wants to capture Lime and his co-conspirators. Martins is ambivalent. Anna Schmidt is unwaveringly loyal to Lime though she acknowledges he has done evil. For her, personal relationships, in a word, love, trumps virtue. While Anna’s attitude is narrow, if not actually stunted, the film has her retain her dignity. Virtue is attacked from another angle as well in the film, one brought in by Orson Welles who wrote a speech for Lime not in the screenplay that wittily compares the accomplishments of Renaissance Italy under the Borgias with that of peaceful, democratic Switzerland. It is an argument that art (or beauty) trumps virtue. While Lime is not an artist, he has a charm and vitality that none of the other characters display–with the partial exception of one of his co-conspirators, Baron Kurtz (Ernst Deutsch), who has a certain old world charm .
The ending of the novella is that boy winds up with girl. Such sentimentality is surprising in Greene and, frankly, would have ruined the film. Carol Reed changed it and Greene, to his credit, commended him for doing so. In this way Reed saved the film, ironically making it even more Greenean than Greene intended. The result of the efforts of Greene, Reed, and Welles is an ironical, stylish film noir, a highly entertaining concoction, wherein a dark world of corruption and deceit is not necessarily improved by the efforts of the virtuous.