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The
Third Man
Introduction
When
one has spent one's life suffering the windy
outpourings which call themselves statesmanship, political wisdom and
human
justice ... it is soothing to go into the sewers and see the mire which
is
appropriate to all this.
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Graham Greene's darkest entertainment, The Third Man, ends
with a shoot-out in the sewers of Vienna
and the death of the penicillin racketeer Harry Lime. A convert to
Catholicism,
Greene had found an appropriate image for man's fallen state in the
city's
murky underground. And Lime, with his alley-rat amorality, is a
familiar Greene
character. Greene's literary interest was not just in shabby crooks and
other
compromised characters; he wanted to dissect their morally ambivalent
worlds.
Rollo Martins, a thirty-five-year-old hack writer,
arrives
in post-war Vienna
at the invitation of his oldest friend Harry Lime. To his astonishment
he
learns that Lime has recently been killed in a motor car accident and
is to be
buried that day. On further investigation, Martins discovers that the
accident
is not what it seems. A police source reveals that Lime had been
selling
watered-down penicillin on Vienna's
black market. The adulterated contraband resulted in the death or brain
damage
of children with meningitis. Murder was a by-product of Lime's racket.
Martins
sets off on a blundering quest to prove his friend's innocence, only to
discover that Lime has faked his own death in order to elude the
police. The
authorities then draw up a plan to use Martins as a decoy and bring
Lime into
the open. Martins confronts his old friend in the sewers and, taking
the law
into his hands, shoots him dead. As a result of Martins' amateur
sleuthing,
three men (a porter, a policeman, and Lime himself) have died
violently. Perhaps
Martins should not have strayed into other people's affairs.
Vienna
provided Greene with a perfect setting for his tale of double-dealing
and
opportunist loyalties. The city stood on the border between the Soviet
empire
and the capitalist West and, on one level, The Third Man may be read as
a Cold
War allegory. Greene wrote it in 1948 when the tensions between West
and East
began to emerge after Stalin blockaded Berlin
that summer. It is tempting to see Harry Lime as the fictional
counterpart of
the British spy Kim Philby, who had betrayed fellow agents to the Soviet Union. Greene knew Philby well
during the
war when
he worked for him in British Intelligence, and he stayed in touch with
his
former chief long after he had been exposed as a Russian agent in 1963.
Philby
had helped Communists to escape through the Vienna sewers in 1934; newspapers
later
dubbed him `The Third Man'. Yet it would be a mistake to read too much
into the
idea of Lime as Philby. The racketeer is a compound of many men whom
Greene had
known. His surname suggests not only `Graham Greene' (lime green) but
the
quicklime in which murderers were said to be buried.
In its first incarnation, The Third Man was not
intended to
be read as a book, but was an early draft for a screenplay
(commissioned in
1947 by the London-based film producer Alexander Korda). Greene wanted
to write
the Lime story first as a novella in order to explore characterization
and
detail. The result was one of the greatest films of the twentieth
century, The
Third Man, directed by Carol Reed and starring Orson Welles as Harry
Lime.
Greene wrote the book version in just eight weeks while on holiday in Italy
in 1948.
It has many of the virtues of the film, not least a sharp dialogue and
fast-paced
action. Lime's last stand in the sewers could almost be a burlesque of
the
cheap Western novels which Martins writes for a living. The book also
appears
to parody the Victorian detective novels (Is He The Man?, The Nameless
Man)
which Greene avidly collected.(1). For
some, however, the film is better than the book; it has a greater
suspense and
atmosphere, as well as the instantly recognisable theme tune played on
an
Austrian zither.
The origins of the Harry Lime story are shadowy. In
his
autobiography, Ways of Escape, Greene relates how in 1947 he had
scribbled an
idea for the opening of a story on the back of an envelope: `I had paid
my last
farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the
frozen
February ground, so that it was with incredulity that I saw him pass
by,
without a sign of recognition, among the host of strangers in the
Strand.' That
was it - one sentence. Greene went to Vienna
early the following year in order to develop the story. After two
weeks, Greene
claimed, the story was still no further advanced until he met a British
Intelligence officer who told him of the city's vast sewer system and
the black
market in penicillin. Greene had found his plot.
However, a slightly different story is told by the
surviving
documents. In his book, In Search of The Third Man, Charles Drazin
shows
conclusively that Greene already had the beginning, middle and end of
The Third
Man a good five months before he visited Vienna.
As early as September 1947 he wrote to his lover Catherine Walston:
Tonight ... I felt restless, so I
walked all up Piccadilly and back and went into a Gent's in Brick
Street, and
suddenly in the Gent's, I saw the three chunks, the
beginning, the middle and
the end, and in some ways all
the ideas I had - the first sentence of the
thriller about the dead Harry who wasn't dead, the
Risen-from-the-dead story,
and then the other day in the train all seemed to come together. I hope
to God
it lasts -
they don't always.
Twelve weeks later, in December 1947, Greene and his
director friend Carol Reed were invited to dinner by the film producer
Alexander Korda at his offices in Piccadilly. Talk was of Reed's
recently
completed movie The Fallen Idol, based on Greene's mesmeric tale about
the
corruption of childhood innocence, `The Basement Room'. Greene had
begun this
story - one of his best - on his way home from Liberia
in 1935 on board a cargo
ship. It tells of a small boy who has been left alone by his parents in
a grand London
house in
the care of their butler Baines and his jealous wife. The
seven-year-old Philip
wants to see what lies beyond `the green baize door' - the dark
basement
inhabited by Mr and Mrs Baines - and he embarks on a hazardous
exploration of
the grown-up world. Philip is clearly devoted to the butler and
idealizes him
quite as much as Rollo Martins had idealized Harry Lime. Eventually the
hateful
Mrs Baines is killed by her unfaithful husband, and the boy is
innocently
forced to betray the butler to the police. He remains emotionally
scarred by
his betrayal.
Critical reception of The Fallen Idol was good when
it
opened as a film in London.
Greene's writing had transposed sympathetically to the screen, and
Ralph
Richardson was memorable as the genial if adulterous butler Baines. The
story
touched on Greene's personal anxiety about the `green baize door'. His
father
had been headmaster of a public school in Berkhamsted near London, and each
day as a young boy Greene
would experience a conflict of loyalties as he left the family quarters
to
enter the pupils' world. Frontiers have a dynamism of their own in
Greene's
fiction: they set off a reflex of unease.
As a Jewish refugee with his own experience of
betrayal in
Fascist Hungary, Korda was impressed by the out-takes he had seen of
The Fallen
Idol. Now he wanted Greene to write an original screenplay for a film
to be set
in bomb-shattered Vienna.
The city would make a good setting for a thriller, Korda believed.
Virtually
every Viennese was involved in black-marketeering of one kind or
another; there
was not merely defeat in the former Nazi outpost, but debasement.
Greene
mentioned to Korda the germ of his tale about the 'risen-from-the-dead'
Harry
Lime. Korda was taken with the idea, and a few days later he agreed to
act as
backer.
In early February 1948 Greene left London
for the “smashed, dreary city of Vienna'.
The Austrian capital was divided into four occupied zones – Russian,
American,
French, British - and everywhere Greene saw evidence and material ruins
of
Hitler's collapsed empire. Some families still camped out with their
children,
competing with rats for food and shelter. Vienna offered as sad a
spectacle as
Sarajevo or Baghdad would do to a later generation, and Greene would to
brings
the city to life in his descriptions of the destroyed baroque elegance
along
the Danube and the `great wounded spire' of St Stephanskirche. Kim
Philby's old
channels of pursuit and escape - the Vienna
sewers - had become an international no-man's-land where criminals like
Harry
Lime could move about unchecked by the city's quadripartite control (2)
Venturing into the Russian zone, Greene went up on a Ferris
wheel in a bombed-out amusement park. As he looked down at the dots of
people
far below, he got the idea for the book's key episode. In the famous
Ferris
wheel scene, Harry Lime asks an appalled Martins whether he would
really care
if any of the `dots' on the ground stopped moving. For twenty thousand
pounds a
dot, Lime believes that anyone would be happy to wipe out one dot after
another. In this chilling scene, Lime is a twentieth-century equivalent
of the
devil's ambassador, who takes Martins to a high place to survey the
world,
alternately threatening and tempting him. `Nobody thinks in terms of
human
beings,' Lime says in justification of his penicillin racket.
`Governments
don't, so why should we?' These cynical lines are spoken in the shadow
of the
industrialized killings of Treblinka and the blinding flash of Nagasaki, which
had brought unprecedented
destruction. Whatever his detractors might say, Greene was a moralist
troubled
by human turpitude and evil in our time. In an article for the Catholic
journal
Tablet in 1951 he wrote: `Today the human body is regarded as
expendable
material, something to be eliminated wholesale by the atom bomb, a kind
of
anonymous carrion.'
The book differs in many significant ways from the
film.
Carol Reed was courageous enough to give his movie a determinedly
unhappy
ending, which even the pessimistic Greene was reluctant to endorse.
Reed stuck
to his conviction that Lime's girlfriend, the political refugee Anna
Schmidt,
would not have any cause to love the man who had just shot him. So the
film
ends with Anna walking imperiously past Martins as he waits for her in
the
cemetery after Lime's burial, not even pausing to acknowledge him. It
is one of
the great moments in screen history. Other changes were made with a
view to
box-office profit. In the book Anna is a physically unremarkable woman.
('It
wasn't a beautiful face,' Greene writes of her. `It was a face to live
with.')
But in the film Anna is played by the mournfully beautiful Alida Valli,
whose
stylish reserve belies a history, one suspects, of Central European
terror and
Stalinist persecution. The film makes much of Anna's fatal love for
Harry Lime
and the irresistible attraction she holds for the lovelorn Martins.
When
Martins moves his hand to her lovely face in the film, Anna turns away:
she has
no need of this `romantic fool' who brings her flowers at midnight and
drinks
too much.
Other changes made by Reed with Greene's consent
were no
less decisive. Rollo Martins and Harry Lime are British subjects in
Greene's
treatment, but American in the film. In Ways of Escape Greene explains
that he
chose Rollo as a deliberately `absurd name', but Cotten objected that
it would
be considered `sissy' by American audiences. Reluctantly Greene
substituted
Holley, derived from `that figure of fun, the nineteenth-century
American poet
Thomas Holley Chivers'. (After that, Cotten recalled, `I stopped
complaining
for fear he'd change it to Pansy'.) Interestingly, the episode in
Greene's
original story of the Russians kidnapping Anna on the grounds that she
was
carrying false papers was eliminated from the film Reed did not want to
make an
overtly propagandist picture that
peddled anti-Soviet, Cold War nostrums. His first intention was to
thrill and
amuse.
In their different ways, The Third Man and The
Fallen Idol reflect
an awareness of sin and human wretchedness that can be termed
`Catholic'.
Greene's gift in these novellas was to locate the moment of crisis when
a character loses faith,
religious or otherwise, and life is exposed in all its drab wonder. Not
surprisingly, the unsparing bleakness of his vision has influenced a
number of
contemporary writers, from Muriel Spark to the Irish novelists Brian
Moore and
Ronan Bennett. However, Greene remains inimitable. Few novelists have
fathomed
with such intensity the suffering and dark places of this earth. And
Harry
Lime, the shabby Catholic compromised by greed and self-deceit, has
become part
of popular culture.
Ian
Thomson, 2005
(1)
See Victorian
Detective Fiction: A Catalogue of the
Collection Made by Dorothy Glover and Graham Greene (1966, Bodley
Head).
(2)
In 1994, I visited the sewers of Vienna with a local Third Man
enthusiast, Dr
Brigitte Timmermann. The entrance by the Stadtpark U-bahn was much as
it had
been in Greene's day, said Dr Timmermann, and I half expected to see
the police
in pursuit of Lime. As we descended into the darkness I could make out
a
graffito on the wall: ‘Lime is my favourite fruit.'
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