The Third Man (Sir Alexander Korda; David O. Selznick) is already a smash hit in Britain, where most critics hailed it as the best movie of 1949. U.S. moviegoers are likely to find it one of the best of 1950. Like The Fallen Idol, by the same brilliant British team—Director Carol Reed and Scripter Graham Greene—it adds an extra depth of character insight and a new texture of pictorial eloquence to the kind of spellbinding thriller that made Alfred Hitchcock famous.
Set and filmed in a forlorn, postwar Vienna, The Third Man is crammed with cinematic plums that would do the early Hitchcock proud—ingenious twists and turns of plot, subtle detail, full-bodied bit characters, atmospheric backgrounds that become an intrinsic part of the story, a deft commingling of the sinister with the ludicrous, the casual with the bizarre. But the central characters are not mere pawns in a melodrama; they are motivated people who speak grown-up dialogue and feel contagious emotions. The film’s most original touch: a unique musical sound track using only a hauntingly twanging zither* which speaks more tellingly than a full symphony orchestra.
The story employs the classic melodramatic gambit of the innocent who walks straight into somebody else’s intrigue and can’t get out. With an old friend’s promise of a vague job, Joseph Gotten, an American hack writer of Western novelettes, arrives in Vienna just in time to rush to his benefactor’s funeral. He learns that 1) his friend was mixed up in some sort of racket; and 2) his death may not have been as accidental as the dead man’s Vienna associates—a seedy baron, a teak-faced doctor and a Rumanian fashionplate—so glibly assure him.
A well-meaning bungler in the tradition of Graham Greene heroes, Gotten decides to clear up his friend’s death and reputation, goes about it with an ingenuous bravado that soon turns him from hunter into hunted. Along the way he becomes involved with a sardonic major of the British military police (Trevor Howard) who had hunted his friend, a melancholy actress (Valli) who had loved him, and, finally, the villain (Orson Welles), a gladhanding, cynical American.
In Director Reed’s hands, a shot of a body floating in the Danube tells a story of its own, a shot of a cat licking a man’s shoe becomes a chilling premonition of shock. Reed gets a grotesquely comic sequence out of an eerie four-year-old boy leading a street crowd in pursuit of Gotten while the accompanying zither jangles like a nickelodeon piano. At every turn, he exploits the hulking shadows and wet, back-lighted cobblestones of Vienna at night. Cameraman Robert (Odd Man Out) Krasker gives beautiful expression to Reed’s photogenic tricks, e.g., as a train chugs out of the station, nothing is seen but the light patterns of its windows projected across a cloud of steam.
Even The Third Man’s flaws are largely the product of its brilliance. To build atmosphere, Reed has filmed much of the picture with the camera slightly askew; after a while, the angle calls too much attention to itself. He has a way of emptying the streets at his convenience and peopling them suddenly when it suits him., And toward the end, he stages a chase through the city’s sewers which, for all its self-sustaining excitement, comes after the story’s major suspense has been resolved. But these are minor faults in the work of a craftsman so skilled that he has earned the right to be judged as an artist.
Director Reed handles his actors as expertly as his story. Valli’s playing of a girl numbed with loyal, grieving love is just right. Gotten and Howard fill out every corner of their characterizations; and a supporting cast of excellent European actors with new faces keeps the stars on their toes. The ultimate proof of Reed’s powers as a director: he has managed to get a temperate, first-rate performance out of Orson Welles.
My Foolish Heart (Goldwyn; RKO Radio) is the kind of movie that gives women a good cry and men a bad time. Strangely enough, it comes from a short story by J. D. Salinger in The New Yorker, literary stronghold of the stiff upper lip. Under the treatment of scripter-brothers Julius and Philip Epstein, the screenplay turns on all the emotional faucets of a Woman’s Home Companion serial.
After seven years of well-heeled marriage, unhappy Susan Hayward has taken to the bottle and guzzled her way to a crisis. Her husband (Kent Smith) demands a divorce and custody of their little girl. Will Susan tell him that the child is not his? The picture flashes back to a bittersweet wartime romance between Susan, a nice girl from Boise, and an amiable Greenwich Village wolf (Dana Andrews). While she keeps her pregnancy a secret, unwilling to snare Andrews into marriage, he scribbles a voluntary proposal, then dies in an Army training accident. She recovers from the shock in plenty of time to hook unsuspecting Smith.
Back in the marital crisis, Susan nobly decides to give up her child rather than tell her husband the truth. But wait. Watching her hover tearfully at the bedside of the little girl, Smith decides that a child’s place, after all, is with its mother, even if mother is a drunkard.
In its dry-eyed moments, this damp fable is brightened by some well-written patches of wryly amusing dialogue. The whole picture wears an air of quality, thanks to Samuel Goldwyn’s handsome production and a group of sincere performances directed by Mark (Champion) Robson. Robert Keith, a Broadway veteran playing his first screen role, acts the heroine’s sympathetic father with sure skill. But nothing offsets the blight of such tear-splashed excesses as the bloop-bleep-bloop of a sentimental ballad on the sound track. Also, the film’s makers seem to have shot two different endings and then decided to give the heartstrings an extra wrench by using them both.
Thelma Jordon (Paramount), in telling the story of a fall guy, has a production polish as bright as a new dime but uses a plot that was minted long ago. Wendell Corey is a petulant assistant district attorney with an ever-loving wife (Joan Tetzel) and two movie-perfect children. But he goes on a binge and is exposed to the mature blandishments of Barbara Stanwyck, who gets him involved in a nasty murder. Corey is disbarred and Barbara dies in an auto accident over the convenient Hollywood cliff that has served as the execution block for many an offender against the Johnston Office code.
The cast tries hard for plausibility and Director Robert (The Killers’) Siodmak builds tension in some of the courtroom scenes, e.g., when the morbidly curious camera paces Barbara from a cell in the county jail, across a crowded street and up three flights of courthouse stairs to hear the jury’s verdict. But taut detail is not enough to prop up the essential fudge-and-marshmallow of character and concept.
South Sea Sinner (Universal-International) is a routine, sweaty melodrama about one of those good-hearted bad girls who have been kicking around the cinematic South Seas ever since Gloria Swahson’s Sadie Thompson. The plot, over-involved but lively, concentrates on showing off Shelley Winters to her best advantage in skimpy costumes of feathers, satin and sequins.
Shelley has been deported so often for misbehavior that she is now down to her last island. Blackmailer Cognac (Luther Adler) hires her to sing in his cafe, and to sweet-talk Macdonald Carey out of some information on a wartime Jap rubber-smuggling deal.
Shelley seems closer to Brooklyn than the South Seas, and the serious lines she gets to speak sound like a bad burlesque of Mae West. But she puts over her songs, mostly such oldtimers as It Had to Be You, with vigorous good humor. Macdonald Carey appears to be wisely conserving his energies for more important assignments. If expert villain Luther Adler had had more to do, he might have stolen the whole show before Shelley had a chance to sing her numbers and get kicked off the island.
* Played by Viennese Anton Karas, a Carol Reed protege, whose recordings from the score quickly became bestsellers in British music shops (TIME, Nov. 28).
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