Film Review: The Third Man

A general fan of noir films of all ages as well as a Welles fan, I got around to watching this one in the past week. While not as “fun” or as “enjoyable” as say Casablanca it is just as much a classic.

Start with the cast and production…you have the widely underrated Joseph Cotten in the lead as an American fiction writer traveling to post WWII Vienna in hopes of filling a job for a friend he hasn’t seen in a long time played by Orson Welles. A more perfect duo has likely not been seen on film between this and Citizen Kane and other Welles works, they work magic with one another. The film’s writer? Graham Greene, he of The Quiet American and other landmark novels. The producer? David O Selznick of Gone With the Wind, Rebecca, King Kong and numerous other famous films. That just scratches the surface of which I won’t dive here which includes director Carol Reed’s use of camera angles, deep focus on some truly lush sets, lighting design, and a deep examination of the concluding chase through the sewers of Vienna which is simply legendary.

The ruins of postwar Vienna are filmed extensively showing the destruction across large swaths of the city while it tries to get on with its life while being partitioned by various competing parties in the Americans, Brits, Russians, and French. This makes the film dark enough in its tone itself before we even get to the root issue which is the theft and reselling of diluted penicillin to the needy by the friend Cotten has come to see and who is now reportedly dead of a car accident. Hundreds of children and Austrians in general are dying or coming down with crippling diseases because of the actions of Cotten’s scamming friend. Further, a Czech actress posing as a local Austrian under false pretenses to escape the clutches of the Russians is in love with Welles character. All of which creates a doomed love triangle with no hope of redemption for anyone. Some of the darkest, nihilist dialogue created for a Hollywood film is found here: “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?”

Just great stuff. You won’t come away with a smile but will come away with a knowledge you have just watched of the best films ever made.

Book Review: The Last Man by Mary Shelley

Woof…at some 400+ pages and written in early 1800’s English this one was a bit of a struggle.

It was worthwhile however. It definitely has its drawbacks as not only is it written in a language/spelling that is often not aligned with our modern speech and structure causing the reader to interpret what the actual words are or a rereading various passages, but Shelley is extremely verbose and overly flowery. A laundry list of adjectives, similes, and metaphors accompany even the simplest of events and items. Shelley was in desperate need of an editor with a sharp pen and to encourage a much more direct approach from her.

I did find the effort rewarding however. Really the book breaks down into two parts, or two stories. The first being the growth of Verney the narrator from castoff youth to an educated and worldly second fiddle to his eventual Brothers-in-Law Adrian and Raymond. It is through him that the romantic and political machinations are viewed and are the primary topics of this first half. Expecting the work to devolve into a zombie apocalypse in the first 200 pages will bring disappointment when you are instead read of loves won and lost, descriptions of differences between England’s benefits gained by a “republican” form of government vs. one of royal bequeathed power, battles between Greeks and Turks, suicides, infidelity, and so on. Its here where Shelley establishes the personalities and orbits of each of the main characters as a proxy for herself and her friends in real life. I’ll leave description of the linkages between each character and their real life compatriots for elsewhere but leave it as Verney equating to Mary Shelley, Adrian to her husband Percy, and Raymond to Lord Byron, as just some examples. Written after the death of her husband, Byron, and her own children there is a lot to be interpreted here as a reflection of her own views of her compatriots after their passing.

The second half of the work is where the undefined “plague” makes its appearance and drives the action after having been near entirely unmentioned in the first half. After depopulating the rest of the globe the plague arrives in England and begins its ravages, forcing all to resign themselves to their early fates. Over 200 pages all individuals and civilizations are stripped away with each loss weighing on the reader as Shelley keeps the descriptions of the lose the most succinct part of the work. Children and spouses are lost and moved on from in a matter of a sentence or two whereas prior events (a trip from one town to the next) might take up 5 pages. Shelley’s own frequent interaction with death certainly has an impact here.

I originally picked up this work as a result of some of the attention it received during this Covid pandemic. A scourge unseen and unstoppable driving irrational behavior among a global populace seems relevant, no? Shelley is far ahead of her time in many things including the idea that if you survive a virus driven malady you will have immunity from it going forward, as her character Verney does here even if he is the only one to do so resulting in the titular Last Man. It will leave you feeling more that man is doomed to fail no matter what his efforts, reasoning, or inherent goodness may be. Nothing stands in the way of the plague, not love, not intelligence, not courage, not beauty, wisdom or any admirable characteristics. In the end we all fall before death’s scythe whether by virus, our own hand, or any other myriad happenstance. All that matters then is how we face it and what we do with the limited time we’re given. While not a happy resolution to the work…its one I can be satisfied by.