…came the taunt when I walked into the living room after my run/walk.
Well, Katie had a right to because Katie had been watching this on TCM this afternoon.
(She sometimes asks me if there’s something “wrong” with her emotions being moved by what she sees onscreen. No, I tell her, it’s the opposite – if she wasn’t moved, that might indicate a bit of a problem. )
She neither wept nor screeched the other night when we watched this, my favorite film of all time. Oh, she liked it – and I think she got it. Although she was surprised when I told her I used to show it to my morality classes.
And I did! Me, the foe of spending class time on movies, who grumbles when my own kids come home saying they watched a movie (Is that what we pay tuition for?) , yes! I screened The Third Man for my students! As well as The Mission and On the Waterfront and a movie that no one is heard of called The Incident. It may have been a very young Martin Sheen’s first film, but I’m not sure. And I also have no idea how I obtained a copy. But it – and all of them – had an impact. And no, I didn’t show them all to the same classes, all in the same course, resulting in one massive movie-fest.
Although teaching morality to late 20th century adolescents…it was tempting.
I actually had not seen The Third Man in several years. What a film. Graham Greene wrote the screenplay, of course, and his fingerprints are all over it. The cinematography, expressed most strongly in that iconographical initial appearance of Harry Lime is like nothing else (link is to YouTube), and the moral tension is fierce, evinced not only in the plot but in that same cockeyed cinematography in which nothing can be seen as it is, as well as in the ruins of Vienna.
(If you’re even in Vienna, you can take a Third Man Tour, by the way.)
The only thing I really can’t grasp in The Third Man is what to make of Anna Schmidt, Lime’s lover. Is her fury at anyone’s “betrayal” of Lime supposed to show the absolute corruption and emptiness of soul that can result from being in a wartime situation? Or what?
Martins: Have you ever seen any of your victims?
Harry Lime: You know, I never feel comfortable on these sort of things. Victims? Don’t be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax – the only way you can save money nowadays.
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