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All-Time Greatest Movie Script?

As we all get ready for the big Carol Reed trilogy at Film Forum, some thoughts on "The Third Man"....

*Famously, Graham Greene wrote the script for this movie. It shares some DNA with Greene's "The Quiet American." In both cases, a rather naive American man ends up in a foreign country and learns some home truths, in an unpleasant way.

*Greene could be masterful with subtext. In one of my favorite moments in "The Third Man," Joseph Cotten seems to be having a public argument with a man about what kind of book he should write next. But--really--the meat of the conversation is: "Mind your own business. Don't investigate your friend's death." The audience tries to understand the weird tension in this dialogue. Watching at home, you know precisely what is going on. A little dramatic irony.

*Another treat in this movie is the use of "misdirection." We think Joseph Cotten is being forcibly dragged to his execution, but in fact the high-stakes car chase we're watching is just an effort to get Cotten to a sleepy "public reading" on time. Also: We see kittens and children and think--that's adorable!--but, in fact, both the cat and the kid turn out to be engines for big, sinister developments in the plot.

*A throwaway detail. A man wants to seem composed, but in fact he's deeply anxious. He reveals his anxiety by gesturing upward when he says "hell" and downward when he says "heaven." Do people write scripts so carefully anymore?

*Genre conventions. I wonder if "The Third Man" inspired Woody Allen, when he was working on "Manhattan Murder Mystery." "The Third Man" seems to be a travel story, but then it seems to become a murder mystery, but then it is in fact a pseudo-murder mystery without a corpse (or at least without the corpse we thought we were getting). A cliche about fiction is that it should move along as seamlessly and authoritatively as a dream--and it's easy to overlook how much thought must have gone into "The Third Man." It's easy because you feel as if you were watching a dream. (The twists and turns may also make you think of "Chinatown," another story in which the crime we think we're investigating actually turns out to be very different from the crime that really occurred.)

*"I don't do tragedies..." Greene makes reference to his interest in social "playacting" when he shows us Alida Valli's character. She whispers urgently with Cotten backstage, then assumes her flirtatious role center-stage. We see her mask drop briefly--she stares, with despair, at Cotten--then she snaps to it, and that big, fake grin appears. Cotten's character does some acting of his own: "I loved your work!" he says later, though we've seen him, bored and restless, in his seat, and he in fact doesn't understand the language getting thrown at him. Secrets and lies! Curses and reverses!

Well, I hope I've persuaded you to see this. Free on Netflix. Time well-spent. Happy Easter!

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