The Third Man and the Wilder Side of Rubble

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Siobhan Craig is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Minnesota, specializing in European cinema.

Notes

1. Mary Ann Doane comments on the presence of fascism as a “haunting” element in film noir in her indispensable analysis of Charles Vidor's Gilda (1946) in Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge,1991), 115.

2. Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will, 1935.

3. For an interesting comment on this scene, see Linda Schulte-Sasse, Entertaining the Third Reich (Durham, NC: Duke, 1996). Shulte-Sasse contextualizes the aircraft's shadow passing over Nuremburg as a visual metaphor later linked to the “eagle's wing” and “eagle's gaze” of Frederick the Great in Veit Harlan's Der grosse Koenig (1942).

4. An interesting discussion of Wilder's relations with the Allied occupation authorities in Berlin around the making of A Foreign Affair can be found in Ralph Willet's The Americanization of Germany 1945–1949 (London: Routledge, 1989), 28–39.

5. See Bernard F. Dick's Billy Wilder (New York: Da Capo, 1996), 63, for an illuminating discussion of the comedic elements of A Foreign Affair. Dick sees the film as simultaneously a “romantic” and a “political” comedy, and comments on the ambivalence that characterizes this unlikely “comedy” set in the post-holocaust rubble-scape of Berlin.

6. The casting of Dietrich as the former mistress of a high-ranking Nazi official is, of course, itself a deliberate irony. Dietrich was in real life a dedicated anti-Nazi, and used her considerable star power to aid the Allied war effort.

7. In a typically sly snippet of dialogue, Wilder uses this scene to further undermine the gender stability of Pringle's character. When asked by his metamorphosing companion, Miss Frost, how he knows so much about women's clothing, Pringle makes the nonsensical reply: “My mother wore women's clothes.” It is an explanation that explains nothing, and leaves the question dangling. Pringle, the soldier who talks about sending “shorts to the cleaners and getting back a girdle,” never comes to rest in any stable gender identity. It is also worth noting that in this scene Pringle adopts an analogous role to Mammy who dresses Scarlett in Gone With the Wind; he thereby not only casts himself as ambiguously gendered, but appears to cross-racial boundaries as well.

8. The joke of Miss Frost's name also depends partly on her having polysemic and possibly contradictory “labels” attached to her. “Frost” clearly implies whiteness, rigidity and coldness; her first name, Phoebe, refers to the goddess of the moon—cool and white—but also perhaps to the sun god, Phoebus Apollo, implying heat, light and passion.

9. It is worth noting that Miss Frost describes her goal as eliminating a moral ‘malaria,” casting immorality as a tropical disease which can't exist in cold climates. She also uses metaphors of infestation—promising to “fumigate” Berlin.

10. Bernard Dick also comments on the importance of her hair in defining Miss Frost as a character, describing it as “a coronet that looks like a halo.” See Bernard F. Dick Billy Wilder (New York: Da Capo 1996), 64.

11. For a fascinating discussion of Dietrich, framing and the femme fatale in film noir, see Mary Ann Doane's analysis of Josef von Sternberg's veiling and revealing of the face of Deitrich in The Devil is a Woman (1935) and The Scarlet Empress (1934), in Femme Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1991), 72–75.

12. Dietrich's cabaret songs in A Foreign Affair are reminiscent of other moments in film noir in which lyrics sung by the female lead seem to provide an ironic—even contradictory—metacommentary on the point of view ostensibly espoused by the film. For example, see Richard Dyer's comments on Hayworth singing “Put the Blame on Mame” in “Resistance Through Charisma: Rita Hayworth and Gilda,” in Women in Film Noir, E. Ann Kaplan, ed. (London: BFI, 1980).

13. See Lutz Koepenick The Dark Mirror: German Cinema Between Hitler and Hollywood, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002, for an interesting discussion of the dissonance and subversiveness embodied by Dietrich's unique singing style; Koepenick analyses Dietrich's extra-diegetic songs in Fritz Lang's 1952 Hollywood western, Rancho Notorious.

14. Richard Armstrong, in his brief discussion of A Foreign Affair, dismisses it as “simply a very capable genre comedy.” See Richard Armstrong Billy Wilder: American Film Realist (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000).

15. Billy Wilder, of course, initially returned to Berlin at the U.S. taxpayer's expense. He was originally sent back to his native city by the U.S. Army Signal Corps to make Death Mills (1945), a documentary designed to confront the German civilian population with the realities of the Holocaust. It is worth noting that Wilder's mother and grandmother died in Auschwitz. This casts an interesting light on his refusal to moralize about Nazism in A Foreign Affair. Erika's Nazi associations, and the question of her complicity, are presented in the film as bureaucratic problems rather than moral ones: if she can get the right documentation from the Allied authorities, past associations will no longer impede her.

16. Again, see Doane's discussion of the veiled female face in film noir.

17. The title is widely considered to be an allusion to T.S. Eliot's “The Wasteland,” invoking the unseen but always present companion, the “third,” (“Who is the third who walks always beside you?”) and places the setting of the film within Eliot's cascade of cities, the “Falling towers” of “Jerusalem Athens Alexandria/Vienna London.” See, for example, Rob White's analysis of The Third Man (London: British Film Institute, 2003), 52–55. This evocation of “The Wasteland” sets the stage for the dislocation, linguistic disorientation and cascade of referentiality that are so characteristic of the film.

18. For a brief discussion of The Third Man in the context of British film noir, see Tony Williams’ essay “British Film Noir” in Film Noir Reader 2, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini (New York: Limelight, 1999), 251.

19. See Rob White, The Third Man (London: British Film Institute, 2003), 8, for an illuminating discussion of the initial voice-over.

20. See William VanWert's discussion of the untranslated German dialogue in “Narrative Structure in The Third Man,” Literature/Film Quarterly 2.4 (Autumn, 1974), 341–346.

21. Interestingly, the German language sequences were shorter in the American version of the film than in the British one—see Rob White, The Third Man (London: British Film Institute, 2003), 9. Presumably, European audiences were considered more able to tolerate indeterminacy and the suspension of meaning.

22. See Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior. Trans. Beverley R. Placzek (New York: Grove Press, 1975); and Eric Santner's Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).

23. For a fascinating discussion of parodic echoes of the western in The Third Man, see James Palmer and Michael Riley “The Lone Rider in Vienna: Myth and Meaning in The Third Man,” Literature/Film Quarterly 8.1 (1980), 19–20.

24. The balloon seller in The Third Man is an obvious and explicit homage to Fritz Lang's M (1931), in which a similar character plays a pivotal role. There are several visual references to M, and many more to German Expressionist film generally, throughout The Third Man. This emphasizes, again, the film's self-referentiality; Reed continuously foregrounds his film as film, to be read as part of a broad intertextual matrix of images.

25. The unstable masculinity and the homoerotic subtext were at least partially conscious in the making of the film. Graham Greene's original name for the protagonist was Rollo. Joseph Cotten refused to play the character so named because the name seemed homosexual to him. Greene accepted the compromise “Holly” because it retained the “ridiculousness” he desired. David O. Selznick was evidently highly suspicious of the relationship between the two men, referring to “buggery.” Rob White, The Third Man (London: British Film Institute, 2003), 18–19.

26. For a discussion of the resurrected Harry Lime as a vampire figure, and The Third Man's references to Gothic fiction, see John A. Dern, “The Revenant of Vienna: A Critical Comparison of Carol Reed's Film The Third Man and Bram Stoker's novel Dracula,” Literature/Film Quarterly 33.1 (2005): 4–11.