Category: Film

In Search of The Third Man by Charles Drazin

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

The Third Man was a huge success when it came out in 1949, and has been regarded as a classic film ever since. This story of disillusionment and betrayal in a shattered and divided post-war Vienna has become part of the culture and over the years has been referred to in many other films, books and TV series. The title itself has entered the language, helped by its association with the Cambridge spies and Kim Philby’s denial that he was “the third man”. Indeed, it has been suggested that Graham Greene had his former intelligence boss Philby in mind when he wrote the character of Harry Lime.

It’s a measure of the impact of The Third Man that there is a museum devoted to the film in Vienna. There are even guided tours of the Vienna sewers, where the film’s dramatic climax takes place. In Search of The Third Man by Charles Drazin was published in 1999 for the film’s fiftieth anniversary.    

The circumstances of the making of the film have almost become a myth. Part of the reason for this is that it was brought to the screen by three high-profile creative artists. Over the years, Graham Greene, Orson Welles and Carol Reed gave their own versions of the making of the film. Each had their reasons for embellishing the facts or suppressing inconvenient truths.

Drazin goes back to primary sources to get behind these accounts, to establish the truth about the film, and in the process to explain how and why the myths became accepted as the truth in the first place.

For example, when the film was made, Carol Reed was regarded as one of the world’s great film directors, whereas Welles’ reputation was rather in the doldrums. Over the years, this position reversed itself, so it became easy for people to believe the claims that Welles had directed whole sections of the film himself. Drazin confirms once and for all that Welles’ only contribution beyond his acting was the famous “cuckoo clock” speech.

Appropriately, for a story that is so concerned with the difference between appearance and reality, it turns out that nothing is quite as it seems in this film. While watching it, you would assume that it was all filmed on location in Vienna, yet many shots were filmed in the studio back in England, and then knitted together seamlessly with the location footage by director Carol Reed. And it is assistant director Guy Hamilton’s looming shadow rather than Orson Welles’ that Joseph Cotton chases.

Drazin identifies how the theme of betrayal, so prominent here, runs through all Graham Greene’s writing. He explores in detail just how and why Greene might have based Lime on aspects of Philby’s early life. He suggests that Reed’s approach as a director was peculiarly in sympathy with the tone of Greene’s writing.

He also establishes that filmmaking is a collaborative process and the success of a film can never be wholly attributed to the work of only one or two individuals. There is a sort of mysterious alchemy about the whole process, and a certain amount of luck. The Third Man was one of those rare occasions in cinema when everything just aligned the right way, as if it was meant to happen like that. Yet a good deal of that luck could be put down to the creative intuition of Carol Reed and Drazin sees The Third Man as his film, more than anyone else’s. For example, it was Reed who tracked down the unknown zither player Anton Karas and insisted that his music should be used, rather than an orchestral score as was normal at the time.

Several people who worked on The Third Man in a junior capacity, and who are interviewed here, went on to great things. John Hawkesworth was later responsible for the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes TV series and Guy Hamilton directed several James Bond films, as well as the Len Deighton adaptation, Funeral in Berlin.

This is a thoroughly well-researched, highly readable and enjoyable book, essential reading for anyone who loves the film. Sometimes, a “behind the scenes” book can lessen one’s enjoyment of a film. That is not the case here. Knowing the difficulties behind the production makes the film even more fascinating.        

Welles almost didn’t play the part of Harry Lime. Another actor prevaricated for so long about accepting the part that he had to be dropped from the production. Yet would we find the film so compelling today if it had been Cary Grant standing in that doorway?             

Carol Reed’s Night Train to Munich

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

I haven’t written about a film for a while, but I enjoyed this one so much I really felt I had to. Night Train to Munich is an earlier film directed by Carol Reed, now most famous for The Third Man.

Rex Harrison plays a British agent who impersonates a German officer in order to exfiltrate a Czech engineer and his daughter from Nazi Germany at the very beginning of the second world war. His manner is very characteristically English: flippant on the surface and deadly serious underneath.

This 1940 film is best described as a comedy thriller. If you like the earlier sort of spy fiction, the chances are you will enjoy this, because it feels like a compendium of John Buchan, Eric Ambler and Sapper. Indeed, at one point our hero says “I’m not Bulldog Drummond, you know”. It’s also an example of that genre of films and novels set on long-distance trains that flourished in the 1930s.

One of the things that is striking about this film today is the strength of the anti-Nazi propaganda message. No opportunity to either ridicule or criticise the Nazi regime is missed. It’s depicted as a mixture of brutality and absurd bureaucracy. Early scenes take place in a concentration camp, at this stage depicted as a place for political prisoners. Even Mein Kampf is sent up: “They give a copy to bridal couples over here.” “I don’t think it’s that sort of book, old boy.” It’s almost shocking to hear Harrison, in his guise as a loyal Nazi, say that “England is controlled by the masons and the jew Churchill”.

An awful lot is packed into a suspenseful and brisk ninety minutes or so and the whole thing moves along at a cracking pace, with several clever plot twists, and one in particular that is a real surprise, even today.

I found myself thinking that this is like a Bond film before there were Bond films, and indeed, wondering if Ian Fleming saw it. The finale on the Swiss border will seem familiar to anyone who has seen Where Eagles Dare, so again, I wonder if Alistair Maclean saw the earlier film at some point.

The film has been considered as a sort of follow-up to the earlier and more famous The Lady Vanishes, also written by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, the scriptwriters here. Despite the repeat appearance of the Charters and Caldicott characters and Margaret Lockwood, I think the resemblance is overstated. For a start, despite the title, far less of Night Train to Munich actually takes place on the train. Carol Reed’s directorial style is also quite different to Hitchcock’s, grittier and more realistic and this, as well as the urgency of the wartime situation, gives the film a very different atmosphere.

John Buchan wrote that thrillers should have “a story that marches just within the bounds of the possible” and that is very much the case here. If you fancy a bit of lockdown escapism, Night Train to Munich is available free on Amazon Prime.

The Good Soldier: a good film

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

I finally watched the DVD of The Good Soldier the other week. This is an adaptation of the 1915 novel by Ford Madox Ford, much admired for the unreliability of its narrator. My partner is not altogether a fan of the book, but she enjoyed this as much as I did. We both thought it was really excellent. Everything just seemed to come together to produce an adaptation that was faithful to the feel of the book.

It is quite rare that you have an ensemble piece like this where the actors playing the main characters are all perfect for their roles, but in this the four principals were all dead right. Jeremy Brett, Susan Fleetwood, Robin Ellis and Vickery Turner all seemed to be the characters from the book as I remember them.

The locations were dead right, too. I think they may have used the actual German spa town, Bad Nauheim, in which the early part of the book takes place. These parts of the film had the same sense of leisured ease, with nobody in too much of a hurry, that comes across in the film of Death in Venice.

The screenplay adaptation was a masterclass, really, in how to take quite a complex, literary novel and make it work on screen. It’s a long time since I read the book, but I think the major change was the flashback structure. We knew from the beginning that Ashburnham was going to be dead at the end, and this worked really well.

Scenes were repeated, as the both the audience and the character Dowell gained more knowledge about what had really been going on. The look on Dowell’s (Robin Ellis’) face when Leonora told him that Flora and Edward had been having an affair was quite something. These repetitions gave the film something of a Nicolas Roeg feel.

Jeremy Brett was magnificent as Ashburnham, perhaps the best thing he ever did on screen, even better than his Max de Winter. I always thought he was a bit wasted as Sherlock Holmes. I have the feeling that Susan Fleetwood was sometimes a bit hard to cast, because she seemed to radiate strength of personality all the time and that wasn’t always what was called for, but here it was exactly right.

Going back to the screenplay, it was of course by Julian Mitchell and quite the equal of Pinter’s scripts for the Losey films, I thought. The only thing I can say against this film is that it is in need of a good restoration and clean up; the print on the Network DVD is a bit faded. I suppose it is not well-known enough to get the full digital upgrade treatment, which is a great pity.

I was unaware that this film had been made until I found it on DVD. I had seen the text of a stage adaptation, so I assume that is derived from his screenplay. I can’t think how I managed to miss this. It was first broadcast in 1981, at around the time Granada were making some really good TV drama. It may be that I had not actually read the book at that point and therefore did not notice it in the schedule.

It is a great pity that it was not released in the cinema first, like the films that Channel 4 made later in the 1980s. I think that, if it had been, it would quite rightly be regarded as a classic today. It is not for nothing that Robin Ellis has devoted a whole section on his website to this film. And of course, the highest compliment I can pay is that it has made me want to read the book again. I read a fascinating piece online that suggested that John Dowell is not quite the innocent he portrays himself as. I shall have to read it once more to find out.