Apostrophe S

Harry Lime (Orson Welles):

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 read Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American” in my last semester in college as extra credit for a Vietnam war history class. The novel, set in French Indochina in the ’50s, follows grizzled British journalist Thomas Fowler as he stubbornly holds on to his life in Vietnam. Other characters come and go, but “The Quiet American” was never well known for its love triangle or anything to do with the story. It was the setting. Greene lived in Vietnam, and his book predicted the failure of American intervention in the the southeast Asian country. See, Greene had a knack for knowing which small places in the world were the most interesting.

“The Third Man,” based on another Greene novel which he adapted for the screen himself, is set in Vienna, Austria, immediately following the second world war. Vienna is at the time divided into four zones, a French zone, a British zone, an American zone and a Russian zone. Goods and supplies are short, creating a thriving black market, which the characters in the story get mixed up in. But the real beauty of the film is not the main plot, but the background, a stunning black-and-white postwar Vienna and all the political intrigue that comes with it.

Giving any of the plot away is giving it all away. Suffice to say that Orson Welles gives a ghostly performance in a “star role,” meaning you hear a lot about him in the first hour of the film, but you don’t get to see him.

I recommend it.