It's a Noir World After All

I got the best gift yesterday morning and the timing couldn’t have been better. Every Sunday I play softball in a local league, and one of my teammate’s best friends gave me a copy of the new Criterion re-release of the 1949 Carol Reed classic The Third Man. Not only is this one of my absolute favorite films (and, to my mind, one of the best motion pictures ever made), tonight’s SIFF lineup is a salute to Noir with screenings of Joseph H. Lewis’ 1955 feature The Big Combo and Vincent Sherman’s 1950 Joan Crawford classic The Damned Don’t Cry (which I can’t wait to see).

But The Third Man towers (figuratively, literally, completely – every “ly” you can think of) above both of them. It goes without saying this complexly plotted and blissfully entertaining Vienna mystery (brilliantly written by Graham Greene) is probably one of the most influential productions of all time. Sure it was, like one of the essayists in the Criterion release proudly states, a “happy accident,” but that doesn’t make its lasting impact any less significant.

The film is the story of Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton), an American writer of novelettes entering a divided post-war Vienna with a smile. He’s there to take a job offered by former school chum Harry Lime (Orson Welles), but no sooner does he get off the train does he discover Harry is dead, killed in a freak accident. Soon Martins is embroiled in a Black Market mystery leading him to a beautiful actress (Alida Valli) who loved – loves – his late friend to the point of her own potential destruction.

There are few greater pleasures in film than The Third Man. From the performances of Cotton, Welles, Valli and Trevor Howard, to Robert Krasker’s stunning black and white photography, to the delirious plinka-plinka-plinka-plink of Anton Karas’ timeless Zither score, you’d be hard pressed to find a more stupendous example of Noir perfection than this European puzzle box. The story of the film’s production was hardly melodious or without conflict, but somehow some of the most talented (and ferociously ego-driven) personalities in Hollywood history managed to work together to craft a classic that holds up just as well now as it did in 1949.

Just for fun, here’s one section of dialogue everyone, including those who’ve never seen (let alone heard of) The Third Man knows:

Harry Lime: Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't. Why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat, I talk about the suckers and the mugs - it's the same thing. They have their five-year plans, so have I.

Holly Martins: You used to believe in God.

Harry Lime: Oh, I still do believe in God, old man. I believe in God and Mercy and all that. But the dead are happier dead. They don't miss much here, poor devils.

(Discussion continues for a couple of seconds before Lime exits the Ferris Wheel to leave but, before he does, he gives one of the single most famous speeches in all of Hollywood history)

Harry Lime: Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long Holly.

I can’t wait to see the other two Film Noir titles this evening at SIFF. As good as both are, though, I can’t begin to think I’ll be as happy watching them as I was yesterday afternoon savoring The Third Man.

In other festival news, two wonderful events happened for me over this past weekend. The first was that I went to a midnight screening of the tense and terrific Norwegian slasher picture Cold Prey. The other was that my softball team scored 46 runs in two games only having to play nine innings in total vaulting us into first place in our local league.

The second doesn't really mean anything (other then it makes me smile) but the first is the important one here. After having to endure the truly heinous Hostel Part II, the thought of having to sit through another piece of serial killer sludge was almost too much for me, but I had friends who wanted to see this one and I couldn’t very well let them down. But, trust me, after enduring that monstrosity the last thing I really wanted to do was watch some psychopath kill people for an audience's amusement.

Thank goodness I didn’t because good-golly-miss-bloody-molly this one was great! This is as stripped down and as suspenseful as any good horror flick I’ve seen in ages. The saga of five snowboarders trapped in an isolated mountain inn after one of their crew breaks his leg, all of them stalked by a gigantic assailant armed with a pickaxe, I literally found myself glued to very edge of my seat. Not bad considering this was my fourth film of the day and the screening didn’t even start until midnight.

Kudos have to go director Roar Uthaug (if Roar isn’t the perfect name for a horror director I don’t know what is) and screenwriter Thomas Moldestad. Their picture is a lean, lithe, tense and brutally scary good time. Beautifully shot by Daniel Voldheim and with truly killer (excuse the pun) production design (no one attributed, but the IMDB lists Kristian Sinkerud as being responsible for “Production Management” so I guess I’ll give the props to her) this thriller is seriously a total kick in the pants. For true horror aficionados this, not Eli Roth’s heinous sequel, is the real can’t miss adventure, and when it hits DVD I hope everyone out there gets a chance to check it out.

Otherwise, the rest of my SIFF weekend was rather underwhelming. The great Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Séance) had his first outright failure with the turgid and unremarkable ghost story Retribution, while Antonio Banderas’ Summer Rain was absolutely beautiful to watch visually and completely empty on the emotional front. I missed both Lars von Trier’s The Boss of It All and Milos Forman’s Goya’s Ghosts (much to my frustration) but I did get to see Timur Bekmambetov’s Day Watch again, and while it still didn’t make a whole lot of sense I admittedly enjoyed it a heck of a lot more the second time than I did that first viewing.

I guess that’s something.