The Third Man – Graham Greene, 1949 ★★★½

Dirty Deeds in Vienna

Trust no one. Believe nothing. Whenever you imagine the worst possible outcome, rest assured the final result will be worse.

Paranoia as art had been around for most of the 20^th century; in The Third Man Graham Greene transformed it into entertainment, a mass-market hit on its own which connected to the unsettled postwar zeitgeist. A seminal work, unquestionably; but how good, really?

As a movie, which is how it is best remembered, The Third Man holds up quite well with a striking visual approach and engaging performances. As a book, what you get is a lean, well-paced mystery story enveloped in postwar atmosphere and European ennui.

The movie is better, but the book has its own qualities. Let us look at them.

Our story opens with Rollo Martins, a writer of dime westerns, arriving in Vienna to connect with a childhood friend, Harry Lime. He soon learns Lime was killed in a car accident. Even more shockingly, Lime is called a racketeer. All this is explained to Martins by the novella’s narrator, a British officer named Calloway who helps oversee Austria’s postwar occupation. Martins does not take the news well:

“Tyres, saccharin…why don’t you policemen capture a few murderers for a change?”

“Well, you could say that murder was part of his racket.”

A man sells black-market cigarettes in postwar Vienna. Greene describes a grim city: "...all over Vienna the snow melted, and the ugly ruins came to life again: steel rods hanging like stalactites, and rusty girders thrusting like bones through the grey slush."
Image from https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1182634

Martin roots around the old city, trying to get at the bottom of his old friend’s life and cause of death and prove Calloway wrong. Eventually, he discovers much more than he bargained for. As Harry’s old girlfriend Anna puts it: “Everybody’s in a racket.”

The book does a lot of things differently than the movie. For one, you have a different first name of the Martins character, which is Holly in the film. Rollo is English, not American as Joseph Cotton played Holly in the movie.

Perhaps as a result of that Englishness, what Martins has in the book that he doesn’t in the movie is a dollop of real likeability. You genuinely feel bad for him when he reacts badly to Calloway’s information about Lime’s true nature. Cotton’s Holly is sullen, rude, quick to judge, a typical ugly American. In the book, you feel Rollo’s hurt:

There are some people, he explained to me carefully, whom one recognizes instantaneously as friends. You can be at ease with them because you know that never, never will you be in danger.

A postcard showing the Prater amusement park in Vienna. One of a few city sights that survived World War II, its Ferris wheel plays a prominent role in both book and film versions of The Third Man.
Image from https://prater.at/en/prater-history/ 

Rollo is speaking here of Anna, Harry’s girl, but I assume his blanket statement covers Harry, too. “One never knows where the blow may fall” is the first line of the novel and sums up Harry all too well.

The novella spends a lot of time detailing the friendship Rollo enjoyed with Harry, a rather unequal relationship of the kind common to British boarding schools of that period. Rollo was the awestruck follower, Harry the rascally alpha dog, whose lessons for Rollo sometimes came in letting him bear the brunt of punishment for Harry’s misdeeds.

Rollo feels completely adrift when he learns about a deadly penicillin racket, to the point where he actively rejects everything told him about Harry, including Harry’s death in a strange car accident. Seizing on a scrap of shaky eyewitness testimony, he goes on a quest to find a “third man” seen at the accident, in order to prove, well, something other than an official story that makes Harry a villain.

This sets up both Rollo and the reader rather well.

The climax of both the book and film versions of The Third Man occurs in Vienna's vast sewer network. "If you know your way about you can emerge again almost anywhere in the city," Calloway tells Martins.
Image from https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-third-man-1949

As he did in his earlier spy story, The Confidential Agent, Greene fills out details in a gradual way that can be ponderous. Martins is clearly not the sharpest tool, and Greene has him ask a lot of the same questions to people he trusts too much to give the right answers. This makes him frustrating company.

The best character in the book is probably Vienna itself:

The Danube was a grey flat muddy river a long way off across the second bezirk, the Russian zone where the Prater lay smashed and desolate and full of weeds, only the Great Wheel revolving slowly over the foundations of merry-go-rounds like abandoned millstones, the rusting iron of smashed tanks which nobody had cleared away, the frost-nipped weeds where the snow was thin.

Greene’s style reminds me in places of Hemingway’s, terse and elliptical. Early on, we are told Martins has an alcohol problem, that as he put it he “had been mixing his drinks,” a condition exacerbated by a lonely condition. “The third stiff whisky fumed into Martins’ brain, and he remembered the girl in Amsterdam, the girl in Paris: loneliness moved along the crowded pavement at his side.”

In the movie, it is Anna that presents companionship, a fleeting shot at love for Holly. In the book, Harry seems to have been that outlet for Rollo, not a romantic connection, but a real human one that makes Rollo’s discoveries in the book a sharper fall from grace.

The second of three collaborations between director Carol Reed (at left) and screenwriter Graham Greene (right), The Third Man was initially released as a film. Greene then published a short novel based on his original conception of the project.
Image from https://www.allposters.com/-sp/Film-Director-Carol-Reed-and-Author-Graham-Greene-Sitting-on-the-Floor-with-Wine-Glasses-Posters_i3783766_.htm 

Everywhere in the book, appearances prove deceiving. Even the comic relief reflects this. Rollo the western writer is mistaken by a British cultural ambassador for another Martins of more academic pedigree and persuaded to give a lecture. Hard up for money, he accepts.

Asked who his favorite author is, the unassuming Rollo says “Grey,” meaning Zane the western writer. This gets confused with Thomas Gray, a famous British poet, and results in a lot of argument which Rollo adds to by dismissing high art, which impresses his audience: “Only a great writer could have taken so arrogant, so original a line.”

Harry Lime is all about deception, right from the opening pages when he is introduced as a corpse. His personality is defined by what he can get away with, something which began in childhood and has gone out of control in the global playpen that is Vienna.

When we finally meet him, he has all the earmarks of a sociopath, looking down at humanity from a God’s eye view courtesy of a Ferris wheel:

“Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving – for ever? If I said you could have can have twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stops, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money – without hesitation?”

In the movie, Lime’s charm is augmented by the performance of Orson Welles; in the novella, we are told instead he is a small man of unprepossessing appearance, a face locked in childhood. In the movie he gets his own theme song, a famous hit of the day written and performed by Anton Karas. In the novella he has a theme song, too, which he fools Martins into thinking he wrote himself.

One way the film improves on the book is the character of Anna, played by Alida Valli, who carries more of a torch for Harry than in the book. In the book, she and Rollo walk off together. In the movie, she walks alone.
Image from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l64JIcG-O-k 

Greene’s religious and social concerns are in evidence in The Third Man, though subtle. Lime’s espoused Catholicism is presented as a conduit of his villainy. “The dead are happier dead,” he says. “They don’t miss much here, poor devils.” We are told his racketeering is like totalitarianism when it comes to shrugging off individual guilt.

Where The Third Man’s echoes are strongest are perhaps not with Greene’s other work, but that of espionage writers to come, like John le Carré, who employed the same paranoia to even wider purposes. Here, the narrower aim works to better effect, its emphasis more on the personal than the political. The movie is better, but this is good fiction.