Oooooook, how to unpack this one… I mean, geez.
Talk about ground covered. Here’s
what Criterion has (all of which I’ve read):
…and I don’t know how many critical articles. Go to JSTOR.
You’ll see.
A couple of things to dispense with:
- Orson Welles did not have anything
to do with the directing of the movie.
- The only thing Orson Welles
contributed to the screenplay (since the screenplay is derived directly from
the novella [more on that later]) was the “Cuckoo Clock” speech (the Germans
invented the cuckoo clock, not the Swiss) and the part about his indigestion
(which Welles actually had), but not
the speech on the Ferris wheel (the dots stopping moving is in the novella).
- Anton Karas’s score does get on my
nerves. I realize that people loved it
at the time (makes me think of how excited people got about Indian music and
Bollywood because of Slumdog Millionaire,
and yes, I bought the soundtrack). But
after a while, it’s like “couldn’t you do a different part of the score with a
different instrument?”
- Some critics claim this is the
best British film ever made. That may be
true.
- Yes, Jimmy Stewart was originally
considered to be Martins, and Noel Coward and Cary Grant were considered for
Lime.
- Yes, Lime’s name is derived from
Greene’s name: Henry (Harry) Graham Green
(Lime is a color of green).
- Yes, Greene based the character of
Lime on a double agent named Kim Philby.
- Yes, because of the use of
(copious) Dutch angles in the film, William Wyler (best known for Ben Hur) sent Carol Reed a spirit level to
put on the top of his camera for future films.
- The reason why Karas’s score is
everywhere in this movie is because Reed and Greene were at a restaurant where
Karas was performing, and Reed was so taken by the sound, he asked Karas to
come up to his hotel room and play more, recording some of the score and hiring
Karas on the spot to score the film.
There’s four stages to talking
about this film. One is Graham
Greene. Two is Vienna. Three is Reed / Selznik. Four is Orson Welles. Graham Greene is an interesting twentieth
century author. His father was in charge
of a boarding school, so Greene was enrolled.
His father was replaced, but Greene remained and was so bullied and
depressed that he attempted suicide several times as a child. His conversion
to Catholicism in his mid-twenties greatly impacted his life as well as his
writing. I remember reading The Power and the Glory in high school
and how impressed I was by it. If I get
time, I’d like to revisit it. Greene was
the first to give favorable reviews to Reed, and they collaborated on two
movies together, this and The Fallen Idol
(1948), which is also a Criterion movie.
Greene was decorated twice by the British government (Order of Merit and
CH [Order of the Champions of Honour]).
He had a TV show in America for a while, many of his works were adapted
for the screen, and he wrote screenplays as well as novels. He was originally involved in TTM because Alexander Korda, British
film producer, had some “extra” money lying around post-WWII and needed to
invest it, so he hired Greene to go to Vienna and come up with something.
Which leads to stage two,
Vienna. Vienna in the wake of WWII, like
many places, was awash with problems and possibilities. The opening of the film explains how the city
was divided up into five sectors (British, French, American, Russian and International). Soldiers became policemen, and policemen
reported in much the way soldiers did.
The problem was that no one understood each other. It was a bureaucratic nightmare. Since the four zones were operating under the
law of whoever controlled the zone, but the international zone was patrolled by a shared
international police force, you can imagine how hard it was to keep any form of
similitude. The line where the police
are (again) taking Anna off to jail and telling her it’s policy, when she says
“I don’t know what policy is” and the British officer whispers back “Neither do
I, Miss,” you really couldn’t explain the situation much better. And even while sections of the city are
bombed-out rubble, Vienna is so photogenic that you can watch the movie just
for Vienna’s sake. The cobblestone
streets, wetted-down to better pick up the light, gleam with a dream-like softness. On the extras disk, they show the actual arc
lights that Reed brought down to use on location in Vienna, and they are
MAMMOTH things. And the studio still has them, which I found curious. Since at least half of the movie took place
at night, and the effect they produced was outstanding, then their transport
was warranted, but I’m sure several people pitched fits about it. But Vienna is gorgeous, even in its broken
way. And yes, there are Third Man tours if you go to Vienna
(which I hope to do in 2014, and yes, I will totally nerd up and go on the
tour). And as far as broken, where
Greene derives his plot is that in fact, tainted penicillin was a huge problem
at the time and did affect a large number of children. At one of the first screenings of the movie,
two of Greene’s (or was it Reed’s?) friends he had invited were silent through
most of the movie. After, they said that
they had sold penicillin after the war, along with other black market items,
but didn’t know about how it was affecting people (especially children).
Third is Reed / Selznick. The extras discuss how wacked out Selznick
was on Dexedrine and whatever else and would not leave the production alone (as
a side note, the only director Selznick trusted with a movie was
Hitchcock). Reed was making a British
movie with a British writer, but Korda and Selznick had made an agreement to do
three films together. Selznick would
provide some American actors to give the picture greater profitability for
American audiences. In Selznick’s eyes,
the picture was supposed to be a vehicle for Alida Valli, promoting her as the
next Ingrid Bergman. So the focus was supposed to be more on her and not so
much on Martins. Joseph Cotten as
Martins was bankable. But Selznick was
adamant about the movie portraying Martins as not so bumbling and inept. Some lines were taken out (most notably the
German gin line Calloway says when they find that Lime has taken refuge in the sewers). He even made them change Martins name from
Rollo in the novella to Holly, because Rollo was too “silly” (but Holly
wasn’t?). But even so, if you listen to
the commentary track with Dana Polan, Polan calls Martins a “loser” every
chance he gets and is always pointing out how Martins is completely oblivious
to everything around him (which to a certain extent is true, but Polan goes
beyond that extent). Reading Greene’s
novella, Anna is not that big of a deal.
But in the film, we spend time with her alone quite a bit, even though
it does little to further the Lime plot.
For a film that many people say is so tight that it never shows us
something unnecessary, I’d disagree. I
really don’t care about Anna. I care
about Lime. And as to who would play
Lime, Selznick did not want Welles, who he felt was box office poison.
Which brings us to Welles. Why was Welles considered poison? Citizen
Kane (1941) has been touted by many
film scholars as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, film of all
time. I disagree, but for that to be
someone’s first go at making a movie, it’s impressive. Is it because his films lost money? All that stuff about Hearst had to be
expensive. He was popular enough to have
CBS give him a radio deal and the US government to tap him for a documentary in
South America as part of the Good Neighbor Policy during WWII. Yes, he went over budget in Brazil, but RKO
was having money problems anyway. So,
the money problem was there. But more
than that was the notion that Welles was the enfant terrible, that he was a troublemaker. He had high standards, and when they weren’t
met, he complained. Publically. Bosses don’t like to hear things like
that. He also had a few movies that were
stylistically left field (the complexity of the plot of The Lady from Shanghai and his version of Macbeth). It was Cotten that
got him involved in TTM. Three things:
contract, contact and germs.
Welles signed a straight contract rather than asking for a percentage of
the box office, which later really hurt his chance at making much better money
than he did get. Two was contact. Welles did actually become Lime. He would not show up on the set. He was bouncing around Europe, would check
himself in to various hotels under the production’s dime, but never quite get
to Vienna. This caused ENORMOUS problems
for the production. They got the assistant
director, Guy Hamilton, to stand in for Welles to be his shadow (that scene
after the big reveal where Lime is running away is Hamilton’s shadow). They left the hanger in the overcoat, as
Hamilton’s shoulders weren’t as broad as Welles'. They had pretty much everything shot except
for the Welles parts when he finally materialized. Now granted, Welles isn’t in the picture all
that much, but it does fuck with continuity if you constantly have to plan
around shots that you have to then go back and do later. There’s this great pictures of Cotten sitting
on set next to a chair labeled for Welles with Kurtz’s dog in the chair. But if that wasn’t bad enough, when Welles
was brought down into the sewers for the final sequence, he emphatically stated
that he could not work down there due to the conditions. Um, it’s a sewer. What was he expecting? He read the script. So Reed then had to have a set built in
London the replicated the sewers, and fly actors up from Vienna to shoot part
of the final sequence. Gee, do you think
that impacted the budget at all? I bet
Selznick was tearing the walls down in Hollywood when he got reports from Reed
and Korda.
The film won best cinematography
(even with all those skewed angles) and was nominated for best director and
editing at the 1951 Academy Awards. It
won the Grand Prize of the Festival at Cannes in 1949. It won Best British Film and was nominated
for Best Film from any Source by BAFTA (although that’s a rather odd category –
can it get vaguer?). But why it wins for
me is its truth.
I
don’t know, but everything in reality right now seems more a fabrication than
movies. The election’s next week, and if
one is dopey enough to turn in a television, the inundation of political ads
saying a question or candidate is right one second and wrong the other is
overwhelming. Hurricane Sandy just
rolled through, and narratives are already being constructed. We’re headed into the last third of the
semester, where every student’s relatives get terminal. Nothing seems real and true and tangible. But Martins and Lime, in that Ferris wheel
cart, discussing the relative value of a human and the nature of motive, rings
more true to me than any other dogma.
The film itself represents the best and worst of humanity. It’s pessimistic and dark and cynical. And at the same time, it’s so beautiful.
