The Third Man debuted 75 years ago and even though he didn’t write, direct, or play the starring role, his performance as Harry Lime nevertheless makes it
By Matt Hansen | Sept 2025
The Third Man debuted 75 years ago and even though he didn’t write, direct, or play the starring role, his performance as Harry Lime nevertheless makes it feel like an Orson Welles movie. It’s unfortunate that the focus falls so squarely on him, since a stellar crew were involved in making it. The screenplay was written by Graham Greene based on his original story, with Sir Carol Reed sitting in the director’s chair, and it stars the underrated Joseph Cotton, who appeared in several of the great director’s best films, including Citizen Kane. Welles dominates the movie because his natural charm and devilish charisma are a perfect fit for what the movie understands about the mendacity of disaster.
We’re in post-WWII Vienna and everything is askew. The grand, cultivated city has been ravaged by war and fascism and economic collapse. The streets are carved up into officially designated Russian, German, and English sectors. People are scrounging to survive, the black market is bustling, and everyone is on the take. Reed expertly depicts the moral and social chaos: expressionistic camera shots are tilted at a dizzying “Dutch angle” which enhances the paranoia and claustrophobia. The film’s pacing has an anxious rhythm as various characters negotiate their legal and moral fates. Anton Karas’ deceptively jaunty theme and spine-tingling zither soundtrack is legendary. Even though it’s shot without color, even incorporating actual footage from the postwar Viennese streets, the morality of the situation is anything but black and white.
Enter Joseph Cotton’s naïve American Holly Martens, a writer of pulp westerns who is in town for a job promised by his old friend Harry Lime. Martens is a good guy though it’s immediately clear that he’s in over his head. Lime has apparently died in a freak car accident, which understandably shakes Martens up, though, given the sardonic expressions on the faces of those who tell him the news, there’s something else going on with his enigmatic old friend. He wants to defend his friend’s honor until he finds out what he was really doing. It turns out that Lime was swiping penicillin from the government, watering it down, and selling it at a marked-up rate to hospitals on the black market. Apparently selling bogus penicillin is especially cruel because it makes the patient immune to future doses of the real drug. Lime has both figuratively and literally been making a killing — including children with meningitis. As the wry English Officer Calloway puts it: “the lucky ones died.”
Five years after the outbreak of the pandemic, Lime’s ruthless opportunism doesn’t seem dated. Award-winning investigative reporter J David McSwane, author of the lively Pandemic, Inc: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick wrote that “a global scarcity of masks created an unregulated market that grew as the Trump administration left states and hospitals to fend for themselves in bidding wars that drove up prices.”
McSwane quotes one hustling wannabe broker of stockpiled M94 masks, wheeling and dealing with the VA midflight about masks he doesn’t even have access to:
“it’s a bunch of buccaneers and pirates! But so were the men who made America. You’re gonna have a lot of millionaires that come out of this. They’re just scoundrels. You have this black market. When the cat’s away the mice will play.”
True indeed. And, though we have not gotten better, nor have we gotten worse with time; evidently the film’s penicillin based plot point had a real life basis.
The scene when Martens discovers that Lime is indeed very much alive is one of the great entrances in movie history. A cat curls up to a well-dressed leg in a darkened doorway as light from a window suddenly shines across Welles’ face which alternately flickers with bemusement, arrogance, and playful nonchalance. Iconic movie reviewer Roger Ebert named it the very moment when he was “lost to the movies” and crooned that The Third Man “embodies the romance of the movies.” It’s easy to see why. Great skill both behind and in front of the camera is required to make us gasp when we see Lime, especially given that we know what a louse he truly is.
When the old friends finally stand face-to-face, they are standing on a Ferris Wheel, which provides both a reasonable spot for a private chat with a fugitive and a great metaphor for the coldly distant attitude Lime has on the rest of the world. This very short scene is a masterclass in minimalism; Lime’s genuinely happy to see his old friend, pleased at his own cunning, sizing up whether his old pal Martens is considering killing him or being killed by him, and cagily tries to appeal to both Marten’s conscience and his cynicism.
At one point he tells Martens to look down at the tiny people milling around far below and frankly asks if he would really care if one of those dots suddenly stopped moving. The reasonable delivery of Lime’s nihilism is chilling. Of course, you know what he means — we pass strangers down on their luck or hear about X number of people who died on the news pretty much every day and barely give it a second thought. Stalin famously said that “one death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.” The mass murderer was utterly wrong. Each statistic represents a million specific tragedies. Yet you can’t help but notice how power creates callousness, how easy it is to disengage from the reality of other people’s lives, and how elites of any kind can easily mistake the people beneath them as no more than dollar signs, lines on a chart, numbers on a page, consumers of an algorithm.
Lime finishes, naturally, with a grandiose rhetorical flourish. He chides Martens for being “gloomy” and quotes an undefined source about how “in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonard Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace — and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” He really sells the comedy in that last sentence. Putting aside whether this is historically accurate, the more you think about the implications the more ridiculous and downright diabolical they become.
What’s he even saying? To take life by the horns? You’ve got to break eggs to make an omelet? Therefore, it’s ok to get rich from prolonging the misery of already helpless and suffering people because at least you have the balls to get yours, no matter who is affected in the process? I’m sure I don’t have to point out where we all might have heard that mentality expressed, both on screen and off. You hear different characters say things like that in the movies all the time and one attribute of today’s world is that it sure seems like life is imitating art. The way that Reed and Welles tell it though, is nonpareil – as the Guardian notes, the film is “near-perfect.”
It’s Harry’s swagger, the confidence, the bravado that sells it. Almost. Welles is clearly relishing playing the bad guy, and not for the first or last time in his career. He knows how Lime really enjoys being himself, a very seductive quality. Which makes him a warning. We see throughout the film how even his girlfriend. played with alluring reserve by the lovely Adia Valli, knows he’s terrible and still loves him. Martens, the kindly schmuck, falls for her and she’s having none of it. It’s Harry Lime who they both reminisce about, puzzle over, and who makes the most lasting impact. Like the movie characters, audiences wanted more: there was a spinoff radio series about Lime, played by Welles, and comic books and TV series. I won’t give away the ending, but there’s a heartbreakingly vivid demonstration (using a Van Gogh reference) of how even if a person is proven to be a monster, it’s not always enough to break their hold on those who love them.
Source: Carol Reed’s ‘The Third Man’ Turns 75 – Book and Film Globe