Directed by Carol Reed
Starring Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles and Trevor Howard
The first time that I watched Citizen Kane, I was prepared to be wowed. This was the movie that I'd read about for YEARS, the best movie of all time according to Roger Ebert himself, endlessly written about and analyzed by film historians and professors. It is an insanely deep film, hypnotically layered as we watch this story about a man whose life is very difficult to interpret. And...I didn't like it. It would be a mistake to say that it's a boring film, because I didn't find it boring. But for reasons that I can't quite wrap the few brain cells I have around, the story of the film just didn't click with me. Call me an emotional moronic film viewer - you'd be absolutely correct.
Spoiler alert: I didn't like this movie, either. The Third Man regularly appears pretty high on the once-every-ten-years-or-so critics' polls out there, and is even considered the greatest British film of all time. Watching this movie, though, was for me an endless slog. I was constantly looking at the clock for reasons having entirely to do with structure. I'm not a structure Nazi - there are films I enjoy that are very abstract and have no structure at all. The Third Man has a structure, but it's 1949 structure. The clear delineations between Act One, Act Two and Act Three just hadn't been pegged down yet, and it shows. With all of that out of the way, let's get to the plot.
Open up on some lovely stock footage of the post-World War II Vienna as narration by Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) clues us in on the premise. Martins is a struggling writer who has come to the Austrian city with the promise of a job by old friend Harry Lime. Almost immediately, Martins finds out that his friend is dead. We get the legal scenes that accompany this, as well, with our hero talking to the authorities and attending Harrys' funeral.
Watching how this movie unfolded, I was reminded very much of many Dario Artento films that I know and love so well. Undoubtedly this film was a big influence on Giallo cinema and Mr. Argento in particular as it shares many of the same conventions. We have the foreign hero in a strange land, witnessing or finding out about an unexpected death, the dissatisfaction with the authorities' official explanation, and the decision to investigate the death themselves. If this film led in some way to the creation of Giallo, that alone justifies its existence. It even has a love interest character for our hero in Anna Schmidt (the lovely Alida Valli), stage actress who also happened to be the girlfriend of the deceased Harry Lime.
As Holly and Anna go about tracing the final movements of Lime, I picked up pretty fast that the movie employs some very strange camera angles, with many scenes framed in diagonals that seemed to place the characters in artificial claustrophobic situations. I looked this up on the ever-accurate Wikipedia and those suspicions were confirmed. It was a very advanced camera technique at the time, and man, did they ever use it. The framing serves as a kind of albatross over the characters through the first half of the film, with the police officers, hotel guests and doctors that the characters track down and talk to giving a pretty staggering amount of exposition leading up to our big shock.
Spoiler alert: Harry Lime is not, in fact, dead. It is a great moment when he appears for the first time, the glowering face of Orson Welles looking at Joseph Cotten from a darkened alley. I love love LOVE Welles as an actor, both here and in Citizen Kane. He also does an amazing job pitching frozen foods and legal services.
Welles has onscreen presence, and I did become more interested in this movie from this point on with him onscreen. The character of Harry Lime has been built up a lot throughout the movie's long dialogue scenes, and he doesn't disappoint. We find out that he faked his own death due to a pretty damn despicable side business that he has going. If there is a line that denotes where the third act of The Third Man begins, it's pretty clearly at the scene where Martins and Harry ride the Ferris wheel, with the latter going on a long diatribe about morality and how many nameless, faceless people below them could die if it meant another large chunk of money being delivered to your bank account. This was great stuff. Unfortunately, the long Tenet-esque exposition dumps soon continue, leading up to a lengthy foot chase that closes the film.Whoo boy, how to sum this film up in ways that don't make me sound like a bigger uneducated dolt than I already am? There were things about this movie I liked a lot. The main sales pitch I would give to someone who has never seen it is Welles' portrayal of Harry Lime. I also liked the signature score, which begins in the opening credits and is repeated constantly throughout the film and will probably be stuck in my head for the next three weeks.
But...I just wasn't into it, man. There's just so much exposition. I guess I'm just fascinated by the weird fascination that film critics seem to have with crime dramas. Critics love crime dramas. More than any other genre, making your film a crime drama seems to instantly raise its quality profile by a solid 57%. I also mentioned Christopher Nolan's Tenet a couple paragraphs ago, and I can't amplify enough how I feel the same way about this film that I did about that one. The entire movie is "go to location...meet character...get new information...repeat." Although it was actually much less tedious here. No joke, I disliked Tenet so much that I walked out of the theater a little over an hour in. So, what did I miss? More dialogue from characters that I didn't give two shits about and nonsensical action scenes brought to us by a guy who loves to tell us how smart he is?
I digress. Rating time: * 1/2 out of ****. So now you all know that I'm not the biggest fan of the film noir/crime drama genre. Fortunately (or unfortunately), I've got a few more of them on the docket for this project, so we'll see if one of them comes along that knocks my socks off.
0 comments:
Post a Comment