January 3rd, 2012
Only so many days left until the misinterpreted apocalypse, people!
Anyway... Today's film is The Third Man (Reed, 1949). There is no real connection between yesterday and today, but because we all love to make connections where there are none, how about this:
The Third Man à Orson Welles à Transformers (1986) à Leonard Nimoy à
Star Trek (2009) à Simon Pegg à Mission Impossible 3 and 4 (Ghost Protocol) à Tom Cruise à Collateral.
I'm not proud, but hey! Topical!
Yes, the trailer is slightly ropey.
Let's talk about the film on a personal basis; I only discovered The Third Man due to ropey price policy at my local HMV. I'm sure there's thinking behind it, but I've yet to fathom out, for instance, why one copy of Once will be £4 while the copy next to it on the shelf - of the exactl same dvd - will cost £20. I understand the basics of marketing, here; you're supposed to think "well, hot damn! I'mma gonna save me £16!", but it's just... Strange.
Another thing they seem to do is in one way more sensible and in another more bizarre; on a basic level, stock is always coming in, and not everything is selling. So how better to free up shelf space than by having a completely random sale? It's cheaper than sending the stock back to the warehouse to be sold on a website that is not, fact fans, Amazon.
So one day - oh, let's say, between five and six years ago, that's a safe bet - I would have been on a DVD trawl in my local store, and there was a copy of The Third Man for £3.
Who could say no to that, really? Well, many people. But they're not here right now, so let's not worry about them.
From a strictly detached standpoint, The Third Man is a strange proposition; taking two American stars, an English director, a neo-realist aesthetic and a bombed-out European city, mix in Graham Greene, simmer, burn the film when you try to edit it so you have to reconstitute it from the negative, release.
It's one of the most interesting examples of adversity making a film work; Welles made the filmmakers chase him around Europe (Paris, to Rome, to Paris) to secure a large paycheck, then refused to do the majority of the chase scenes in the sewers, along with several other scenes that were given to his doubles. Plot points were written, then filmed, then discarded, while the producer - David O Selznick - tried to have the title changed to something like Night in Vienna.
There's adversity, and then there's adversity, and then there's what seems like a constancy of stranger ideas and changes. And while all this is going on, Carol Reed is taking benzedrine and filming in twenty-four hour jags, working three units to get all the filming done, and shipping over Brutes - huge lights powered by exterior generators - that necessitated creatively bending the truth to the locals in order to place them in their rooms for the required lighting of exteriors at night.
And yet, when all was said and done, the film is - and let's not use this word too often, lest we devalue it - a classic. When all the elements combine, and the stars align, and producer, director and star stop fighting long enough, great things happen, it would seem.
So I'm happy I spent that £3, because later I was able to see a restored print of the film at a local cinema - the kind of independent eccentric local cinema that has first a performance by a zither player, then a brief speech from the Austrian cultural attaché - and, the year before last, I actually got to go to Vienna.
So in a way, if I am a filmmaker, I'm happy that The Third Man became such an important film to me, because it acted as a gateway; without the respect I had for the film, I would never have felt comfortable getting into Casablanca, and without Casablanca I would never have felt comfortable with Double Indemnity.
And without Double Indemnity... Well, I'm getting ahead of myself.
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