The cinema : 1952 (1952)

The Third Man CAROL REED TALKS TO ROGER MANVELL A film director's job is quite simply to tell a story. For this he must use actors, and places, and cameras, and microphones. But first and foremost he is a storyteller, like a novelist or a dramatist. If he is telling someone else's story in a film, then he becomes like the producer of a play his whole job is to interpret the story in such a way that it succeeds when it is shown to an audience. The film director who becomes too hide-bound by theory can only too easily forget the vital point that he has got to hold an audience's attention from start to finish. He must understand actors and how to get the best performances he can from them, all in support of the story he is telling. In The Third Man Graham Greene wrote the story, and with it, of course, the dialogue. His screen dialogue is good because it gives the actor something to say on the surface and at the same time something to suggest. The audience should never lose interest in such dialogue which, when it is well acted, always seems to mean just a little more than it says. It is a challenge to actors and audience alike; that is why it is good dialogue. Holly Martins, an American writer of Westerns, arrives in Vienna. He is a simple sort of man, and finds himself lost in a world he just cannot understand. The language cuts him off, for one thing, but, far more deeply than that, his knowledge of human nature is insufficient to cope with the curious kind of people with whom he suddenly finds himself involved. In this post-war Viennese world only the porter at the house where Harry Lime had lived, the man who believes he saw Lime die, establishes some sympathetic contact with him, and, of course, Anna, though she never really gives him more than a fraction of her attention. She can only think of Harry, the man she still loves. All through the film we emphasized the isolation of Holly.