by Sam Ben-Meir
Carol Reed’s The Third Man, recently screened at the Park Theatre in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, is routinely described as one of the greatest films noirs ever made. It is certainly that. But to call it a film noir tells us remarkably little about what makes the film inexhaustible more than seventy-five years after its release.
For The Third Man (1949) is finally not about Holly Martins, the naïve American pulp novelist played by Joseph Cotten, nor even Harry Lime, the unforgettable racketeer brought to life by Orson Welles. Nor is it primarily about Anna Schmidt, the woman who remains loyal to Lime even after learning what he has done. The film’s great subject is Vienna itself—and what has happened to the civilization for which Vienna once seemed to stand.
Few cities were as intimately involved in the birth of modernity. In the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, Vienna became one of the great laboratories of European culture. Here were Klimt and the Secessionists; Schönberg and the revolution of atonality; Freud and psychoanalysis; Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle; Loos and the transformation of architecture. It was the Vienna of Mahler, Musil, Schnitzler, Kraus and Kokoschka—a city in which music, painting, architecture, literature, philosophy and psychology were simultaneously dismantling inherited forms and inventing new ones.
Then came the catastrophes of the twentieth century. When Reed arrived to film The Third Man in 1948, Vienna was occupied by the Allied powers and scarred by war. Buildings stood gutted, streets were strewn with rubble, and the black market proliferated amid scarcity and desperation. Reed and cinematographer Robert Krasker did not disguise this damage. They incorporated it into the visual language of the film. Imperial façades rise above piles of debris; grand interiors coexist with desperate poverty; statues and palaces cast enormous shadows across streets populated by refugees, soldiers, racketeers and displaced persons. Vienna has not simply been destroyed. It has been turned inside out.
This is what makes The Third Man more than a brilliant thriller. It can also be read as a cinematic counterpart to Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), published only two years before the film appeared. Horkheimer and Adorno were trying to understand how a civilization that had placed such faith in reason, progress and emancipation could culminate in fascism, mechanized warfare and industrialized murder. Their disturbing suggestion was that barbarism was not simply something that descended upon Enlightenment civilization from outside. Certain possibilities of domination were already contained within the very rationality by which modern humanity sought mastery over nature and the world.
The ruined Vienna of The Third Man can be seen in much the same way. The shattered city is not simply the negation of the brilliant Vienna that preceded it. It is its terrible historical afterimage. Nothing expresses this more powerfully than the film’s geography. There is the Vienna above ground—the Vienna of palaces, cafés, statues, hotels and remnants of imperial grandeur. And then there is the Vienna below: the vast sewer system into which Harry Lime disappears and through which he is finally hunted.
But the sewer is not another Vienna. It is Vienna. The world below is not simply the opposite of the civilized world above. It is part of the same city, its concealed infrastructure, carrying away what the surface must expel in order to preserve its appearance of cleanliness and order. Reed turns this physical fact into a philosophical image. The darkness beneath Vienna is not an alien realm into which civilization has accidentally fallen. It was there all along.
Harry Lime belongs equally to both worlds. This is one reason he is far more interesting than an ordinary villain. Lime is charming, intelligent, funny and monstrously indifferent to the suffering he causes. His racket involves diluted penicillin sold on the black market, resulting in sickness, deformity and death. One of modern medicine’s great achievements—a substance capable of saving human life—has become, through the mechanisms of exchange and calculation, an instrument of mutilation.
Lime does not reject rationality. He practices a particular form of it with terrifying consistency. That becomes clearest in the celebrated scene on the giant Ferris wheel in the Prater. High above Vienna, Lime looks down upon the people walking below. From that height they are scarcely people at all. They have become dots. And once human beings become dots, Lime asks, what does it really matter if one or another ceases to move?
It is difficult to imagine a more concise image of what Horkheimer and Adorno called instrumental reason. The individual disappears into abstraction. Human beings become quantities, interchangeable units in a calculation of costs and benefits. “Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t. Why should we? … They have their five-year plans, so have I.” The question is no longer whether an action is good or just, but whether it works—whether the machinery accomplishes its purpose efficiently. The height of the Ferris wheel therefore matters. Lime must rise above humanity before he can speak about human beings this way. Distance makes abstraction possible.
Later, Reed reverses the movement. Lime descends beneath the city into the sewers. The man who looked down upon human beings as dots is returned to the condition of an embodied creature. He runs, sweats, becomes frightened, and searches desperately for an escape. The calculating observer above the city has become the hunted animal beneath it. The movement from Ferris wheel to sewer is therefore also a movement from abstraction back to the body.
Even Reed’s famous tilted camera angles acquire a deeper significance when viewed this way. The world of The Third Man is literally out of joint. Doorways lean, streets tilt, enormous shadows detach themselves from bodies. German Expressionism, itself one of the great aesthetic products of European modernism, is being used to conduct an autopsy upon the civilization that produced it. Reed combines expressionist distortion with the documentary reality of an actually devastated city, until it becomes difficult to tell where historical ruin ends and aesthetic distortion begins.
And perhaps that is precisely the point. It would be comforting to imagine two Viennas: the luminous Vienna of Klimt, Mahler, Freud and Schönberg, and the dark Vienna of Harry Lime. One could then mourn the destruction of the former by the forces represented by the latter. But The Third Man permits no such easy separation.
The palace and the sewer belong to the same city. Enlightenment and barbarism are not simply successive historical moments, one destroying the other. They remain disturbingly entangled. The rationality that cures disease can also turn medicine into a commodity; the rationality that administers populations can also reduce persons to numbers; the civilization that produces extraordinary works of art can coexist with extraordinary forms of domination.
This does not mean that civilization is secretly barbarism, or that reason inevitably culminates in catastrophe. Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument is more unsettling than that. Enlightenment contains possibilities of emancipation and domination simultaneously. Reason liberates human beings from fear, but when reduced to calculation, mastery and control, it can turn against the very humanity it promised to liberate.
Yet the film’s most enduring image comes only after Harry Lime is dead. Following Lime’s burial, Holly waits for Anna along the long avenue leading from the cemetery. Reed holds the camera still. Anna appears in the distance and slowly approaches, while Holly waits beneath the trees. Everything about the conventions of cinema prepares us for reconciliation: Lime is gone; Holly has helped expose him; Anna knows the terrible consequences of Lime’s crimes. Holly remains, apparently, the decent man. But Anna simply walks past him. She does not stop or turn. She does not even give him a glance.
It is one of the great endings in cinema precisely because Reed refuses to tell us what Anna’s fidelity means. She knows what Lime was. She knows about the children harmed by his diluted penicillin. Her devotion cannot be vindicated morally, and the film makes no attempt to vindicate it. Yet neither can knowledge simply dissolve attachment. Anna carries something with her that survives the exposure of every illusion she may once have entertained about Lime. Here, too, The Third Man resists the fantasy that enlightenment is sufficient—that once the truth has been exposed, the darkness will disappear. Anna has been enlightened. She knows; and still, she loves the dead man.
There is another irony in the figure she passes without acknowledgment. Holly Martins is himself a writer, but a mediocre one, a writer of formulaic Westerns who has wandered almost accidentally into a city once synonymous with some of the greatest literary achievements of European modernity. In the Vienna of Musil, Schnitzler, Kraus and Zweig, the writer who remains is Holly Martins. He comes armed with clichés—about friendship, justice, romance, perhaps even about how stories are supposed to end. He expects, as we expect, that after the villain has been exposed and eliminated, the girl should belong to the decent man who remains.
Anna refuses the story. Her long walk toward the camera therefore becomes more than the rejection of Holly Martins. It is the film’s final refusal of consolation. There will be no restoration of moral order, no romantic compensation for catastrophe, no reassuring conclusion in which knowledge leads naturally to goodness and goodness receives its reward. The Vienna of The Third Man cannot be put back together that easily.
That is why The Third Man remains something more than a film noir. Harry Lime is unforgettable, but he is ultimately smaller than the city through which he moves. Holly Martins and Anna Schmidt are smaller still. They are figures wandering through the wreckage of something vastly larger than themselves. Vienna is the film’s great body: magnificent, wounded, seductive and diseased.
And beneath its palaces and monuments, beneath the achievements of one of the most astonishing cultures modern Europe produced, the water continues to run through the sewers. It was running there all along
Sam Ben-Meir teaches philosophy at the City University of New York, College of Technology. He is the author of Ethical Interanimality: Toward a Relational Philosophy of Nature (Westphalia Press, 2026).
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