The Third Man

I turned on the television the other day. Through the blizzard of fuzz across my ailing TV set a face rose out of the gloom.
It was a man’s face I recognised, but couldn’t immediately place the movie it was from. It filled the black and white screen he had a wave of grey hair, a slightly skewed look on his face, and a drooping lip. I heard the joyless-but-jaunty zither music of the score and it clicked, one of my favourite films - The Third Man. The face was that of Harry Lime's porter -scared, powerless and confused, caught in the middle of something bad.
The porter tells out-of-his-depth pulp writer Holly Martins there was a third man in the street –not two- when Harry Lime was killed “quite dead”. Martins had arrived in Vienna at his friend Harry’s invitation, only to be told Harry had been killed in a road accident.
Naïve Martins feels something is up, and despite everyone telling him not to stir the murky pot of post-war Vienna he continues to ask questions. He and Lime's girlfriend Anna are pulled into a vortex of deceit, corruption, murder and betrayal which ends sourly.
I loved this film from the opening monologue: “I never knew the old Vienna before the war, with its Strauss music, its glamour and its easy charm –Constantinople suited me better.” It conjures atmosphere. On-screen the wet cobbled streets of Austria’s capital are eerie and deserted, with only the broken poor and international police stalking them. The city is full of broken buildings and bombed out heaps of bricks. The final chase is through the city’s labyrinthine sewers, and the end gives no redemption. It’s unmerciful.
It also has one of the greatest entrances in movie history. As Martins walks though the streets at night he sees Anna’s cat playing at the feet of a man hiding in a doorway outside her apartment. He calls to the man to come out, and a woman in an upstairs window tells him to shut up. She turns a light on and the man’s face is illuminated. It is Harry Lime, the boyish Orson Welles, back from the dead.
The film brought together legendary producer David Selznick, British director Carol Reed and the great novelist Graham Greene. Reed was the first director to use skewed, busted-angle shots, a technique so unusual then a friend sent him a spirit level. Now all thrillers are shot a bit wonky. The way the city is lit makes it another character, with creepy shadows and unseen lights. Several shadow shots are actually impossible, the results of great pre-computer light trickery. We see Harry Lime’s shadow running away, but it is actually the shadow of a man running on the spot in front of a spotlight. The ominous shadow of a man selling balloons enters a square from the opposite direction as the actual actor, because the shot would not work any other way.
But watching in my room in Abuja I realised that something has changed. The film is the same, but something has changed in me. Its not only a film about the search for Harry Lime, it’s also about corruption and poverty. It’s about a failed and broken state where the poor and sick are too numerous to be treated. When the Viennese characters speak they are ignored, and remain un-translated for the audience. The city is divided between outside forces, ruled by a haughty international elite who are enacting their own interests rather than governing for the defeated people. The black market fills the gap they leave. Ordinary people suffer and are exploited. Harry Lime’s racket is stealing penicillin and diluting it, faking the drugs people need to cure their multiplicity of diseases. People continue to die and no one really cares.
Before Nigeria, I’d just seen Orson Welles playing an evil man – Welles and his enigma, his own star quality- in the foreground, the evil somehow in the background. The corruption seemed to be one of the things about the film that didn’t add up (why does Harry invite his friend to Vienna? What was he doing outside her flat? Who would fake drugs, just to make money?)
But years later, knowing about the factories in Onitsha that churn out fake pills, protected by powerful godfathers, Welles’ famous speech reveals more to me than before: “Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you 20,000 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.”