"The Third Man" is one of the greatest film noir movies ever made. Nevermind the actors (Orson Welles & Joseph Cotten), the characters themselves are etched in the minds of film aficionados-- Holly Martins, the naive American author of potboiler westerns...Harry Lime, his suave, charismatic friend who turns out to be selling fake penicillin to orphans in wartime Vienna. That it was filmed on location in 1948, with Vienna in bombed-out shambles, is a miracle.
The Hotel Psycho was up & running
This snake wasn't moving but it terrified every baby passing by
The Bruce Lee/Naked Girl ride
Viennese people have quite a capacity for gruesomeness...this is the Jack the Ripper house
They also have a special affection for surrealism...this tableau has a bouquet of heads in the middle
This is it
They call the cars "cabins" & put a bunch of people in together
This is Holly Martins, played by Joseph Cotten, going to meet his nemesis
Enemies who were once friends, staring out at the great beyond
Things are becoming very small...
...verrrry, verrrry small...
And tipsy
Because of the way the light moves through the fog, all the colors below look pastel
My white knuckles
Haha...these are my terrified eyes
One of the most memorable scenes is of a meeting between Holly Martins & Harry Lime at Vienna's iconic Ferris wheel at the Prater Family Amusement Park. That wheel still stands & I lucked out because it was being shut down for months of repairs the day after I arrived in town.
Amusement parks in winter, when it's foggy & gray without a lick of romanticizing snow, are mostly shut down, thinly attended, & kind of spooky. I roamed around a while, saving the Ferris wheel for last.
The little art critic in the gray hat in the lower right corner is a real girl & is having none of that surrealism stuff
The reason I left the Ferris wheel for last is because...I am not fond of heights. Bridges don't bother me, but I don't like cliffs, glass elevators on the outside of buildings, ski lifts, & I'm pretty sure I really do not like an ancient, creeky, oldest, biggest Ferris wheel ever.
I envisioned Holly Martins & Harry Lime in that excruciatingly tense scene.
You can go to this Vimeo video & watch the scene: https://vimeo.com/76843899
And I thought well, if those guys (the actors) could film that scene with the door hanging open & one character threatening death to the other, surely I can go up. So I did.
Never has a sound track been more perfectly suited to its film. Go here to watch the actual composer play his zither. He was playing it in a bar when the director heard him & asked if he would play the sound track for a movie.
There's a theater here in Vienna that plays the newly restored movie twice a week. I'm going tomorrow!
No comments:
Post a Comment