21May07
If you took a quick poll of the general population of film lovers as to who the most famous classic Japanese directors are, the list would probably be headed by Akira Kurosawa. He is certainly the most visible of the old Japanese masters, though Yasujiro Ozu would likely run him a close second. Trailing some way behind these twin modern favorites, there might, just might, appear a third name, that of Kenji Mizoguchi, the eldest of the trio and the director of eighty-six films made between 1923 and 1956.
Fifty years ago, the same list would have been differently ordered: invisible, or nearly invisible, then would have been Ozu, whose movies only really began to be known in the West during the 1960s. Kurosawa’s fame has indeed been constant: films like Rashomon (1950) and Seven Samurai (1954), then and now, have been absolutely instrumental in introducing the glories of Japanese cinema to Western audiences. But the really resplendent name in the old days was Mizoguchi’s. The French, in particular, were crazy about his work: it was an item of faith among the young critics at Cahiers du cinéma during the fifties (who included future film directors François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette) that Mizoguchi was not only the greatest of Japanese masters but high in the ranks of the greatest filmmakers who had ever practiced the art. General audiences and festival juries of the time tended to share this view: in three successive years at the beginning of the 1950s, Mizoguchi films—The Life of Oharu (1952), Ugetsu (1953), and Sansho the Bailiff (1954)—won the Silver Lion award at the Venice Film Festival, an unprecedented achievement.
21May07
The Third Man (1949) is one of that handful of motion pictures (Rashomon, Casablanca, The Searchers) that have become archetypes—not merely a movie that would go on to influence myriad other movies but a construct that would lodge itself deep in the unconscious of an enormous number of people, including people who’ve never even seen the picture. The first time you see it, your experience is dotted with tiny shocks of recognition—lines and scenes and moments whose echoes have already made their way to you from intermediary sources. If you have already seen it, even a dozen or more times, the experience is like hearing a favorite piece of music—you can, as it were, sing along.
It had its origin in a sort of Ultimate Fiction Challenge gambit. “I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, so that it was with incredulity that I saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, among the host of strangers in the Strand,” Graham Greene had written, without any idea how he would resolve the conundrum. Thus the picture seems to have been destined from the first to be a dizzying mechanical contraption, like a pinball machine.
21May07
As The Third Man’s opening credits roll, the vibrating strings of Anton Karas’s zither slide you into an angular, dreamlike state. The instrument has this particularly sideways and elusive quality that is both playful and dark, sometimes making you turn your head sideways as well. Like the story unfolding, it has a casual velocity, like winding down the shadowy cobblestoned streets of postwar Vienna.
The very first time you hear the opening notes to “The Harry Lime Theme”(a.k.a. “The Third Man Theme”), it seduces you, draws you in, and welcomes you to a strange, elegant, and dangerous world, at once foreign and accessible. And after you’ve heard it, your musical world is changed forever. The same way it is altered when you first hear James Brown or Mahler: so unique, yet familiar. This accessible quality is part of the reason the theme became so popular. It reportedly sold more than half a million copies of piano sheet music at the time, that era’s equivalent of record sales. So “The Harry Lime Theme” was the equivalent of a number-one record before there was even a Top Ten. It has never gone out of print since its release, and it’s been recorded by over four hundred artists, from the Beatles to Guy Lombardo.
21May07
In January 1948, British film producer Sir Alexander Korda, head of British-Lion and London Film Productions, commissioned novelist Graham Greene to write and research “an original postwar continental story to be based on either or both of the following territories: Vienna, Rome.” The resulting script was to be directed by Carol Reed, with whom Greene had just completed a successful collaboration on the film The Fallen Idol.
In February, Greene flew out to Vienna, which had been under the occupation of the Four Powers—France, Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union—since the end of the war. When he arrived, he already had a skeleton of an idea about a character called Harry who appears to be dead but turns out not to be, but it was the city of Vienna itself, and its history, that put the flesh on this skeleton.
Korda’s representative in Vienna, Elizabeth Montagu, showed the writer around the badly bombed and impoverished city. “I took him everywhere,” she recalled. “I took him to the ruins, I took him to the places still standing, I took him everywhere you can think of, including the Great Wheel and all that. He became absolutely enamored of Vienna.”
As well as showing Greene the sites, Montagu introduced him to people she thought might help him with his research. British military officials explained the black market and the tensions that existed between the Four Powers, while an Austrian journalist, Peter Smollett (né Smolka), told him about the labyrinth of sewers beneath the city and gave him some short stories he had written about the difficulties of life in the contemporary city.
21May07
In The Third Man, Holly Martins, an alcoholic American writer of “cheap novelettes” (Oklahoma Kid and The Lone Rider of Santa Fe, among others) and a man who was “born to be murdered,” arrives in the Vienna of 1949 to take up a job offered him by his childhood friend Harry Lime. Within an hour of his arrival in a city that has been, as Carol Reed narrates at the film’s outset, “bombed about a bit,” Holly discovers that Harry has been killed in a car accident; also that he had been strongly implicated in a black-market drug racket.
Being broke, with little else to do with himself, and with Harry’s ex-girlfriend, Anna Schmidt, to divert his wandering eye, Holly resolves to clear up one particular inconsistency in the witness accounts of his best friend’s death that are given to himself and the police. Were there two men who came to Harry’s aid while he was in extremis or were there three? The quest for this elusive third man becomes Holly’s reason for remaining in Vienna, when everyone else seems to want him to go home to America, in what is without doubt one of the greatest British films ever made.
A tremendous amount has been written about The Third Man. Lots of people will tell you what it’s about, but the chances are you probably have a pretty good idea yourself. So let me say right away that, as far as I’m concerned, The Third Man is not about Orson Welles or Harry Lime or Holly Martins or postwar Vienna or the film’s director, Carol Reed, or Harold “Kim” Philby or the nature of friendship. In my opinion, it’s about none of these things—it’s about the screenwriter who wrote it, perhaps more than any other film in cinema history. That screenwriter was Graham Greene, and he was quite probably Britain’s greatest postwar novelist. He was a pretty good screenwriter too. The Third Man is his cinematic masterpiece.
14May07
Define the Japanese new wave however you like—there are innumerable possible launching points, and the name players evident in the fifties and sixties were old and young and in between—but from any juncture, Shohei Imamura was a primary figure and, at the same time, somehow atypical: a thorny artiste among pulp mavens, a pop comic amid tragedians, a deep-dish cynic and folksy absurdist both. When he died, in 2006, at seventy-nine, the two-time Palme d’or winner was one of the last of this postwar filmmaking generation—those who captured a moment of conflict in Japanese society, between modernity and received notions of “Japaneseness”—survived only by Suzuki, Ichikawa, and Oshima. And he may have been the least categorizable filmmaker of the lot, careless with genre and frenzied about social critique. He could also be viciously funny, a factor that alone would’ve set him apart from most of the bigger guns.
The son of a doctor, Imamura began as a studio apprentice to Ozu, and quickly established a distaste for his sensei’s restraint and quiet eloquence. In fact, Imamura was always sort of a Japanese Samuel Fuller, fascinated with working-class ruin and primal impulse. The run of satirical taboo-busters that included Pigs and Battleships (1961), The Insect Woman (1963), and The Pornographers (1966) sensationalized his reputation worldwide and offered up a vision of postwar Japan we hadn’t seen before: as a rat pit of feral opportunism, debasing American occupation, greed, lust, and violence. (The nearly three-hour Profound Desire of the Gods, from 1968, went to an extreme, epically limning a secluded island gone bonkers with inbreeding and superstition.)
14May07
Beware, major spoilers ahead.
Elegant, brutal, anxiety-provoking, and overwhelmingly sad, Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1969 Army of Shadows was released theatrically for the first time in the United States in 2006, to nearly universal critical acclaim. From the Village Voice’s J. Hoberman (“emerges from the mists of time . . . as a career-capping epic tragedy”) to the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane (“lovers of cinema should reach for their fedoras, turn up the collars of their coats, and sneak to this picture through a mist of rain”) to Newsweek’s David Ansen (“the best foreign film of the year”), critics from across the spectrum, who almost never agreed, rallied around Melville’s neglected masterpiece. Too bad the director, who died in 1973, at age fifty-five, was not around to experience how the tide had turned for his most personal film.
The timing of Army of Shadows’ initial French release, in the fall of 1969, could not have been worse. Most serious French critics, including those of the influential Cahiers du cinéma, savaged the film for what they saw as its glorification of General Charles de Gaulle, who, then president, was despised as the betrayer of the May 1968 student uprising. De Gaulle, in fact, is a marginal figure in this French Resistance saga, and Melville depicts him with an irony that makes it clear his heroism would not outlive the extreme circumstances in which the war had placed him. Given the enormous influence Cahiers du cinéma had over American art-film programmers and distributors during the heyday of the French new wave, it’s not surprising that the film was ignored here for so long. In the mid-nineties, however, Cahiers du cinéma published a reconsideration of Melville, and particularly of Army of Shadows, which led to the restoration of the original 35mm camera negative by StudioCanal and its rapturously received Rialto Pictures release in the United States.
2May07
At Criterion, producers spend a lot of time talking about each DVD release—from cover art and liner notes to the special features we present. In the case of the latter, we have a pretty elaborate system in place. We start out discussing the title with each other, hashing out what we think the release should be. Then we go to the archives and reach out to our friends in the film community for materials and more insight. In the case of our upcoming rerelease of The Third Man, producer Susan Arosteguy had assembled a treasure trove of new material related to Carol Reed, Graham Greene, and the production of the film. What we all wanted was a filmmaker’s perspective.
I knew that Steven Soderbergh was a big fan of The Third Man—I had heard him mention Robert Krasker’s cinematography in interviews, and more recently he had talked about watching the film during prep for The Good German. I also know he’s one of the best when it comes to DVD commentaries. I worked with him during the production of our release of Traffic, and then again on Schizopolis, and I realized he’s about as good as they get. He knows film history and all aspects of the process. For those of you who aren’t aware, Steven has shot all of his films since Traffic. Along the way, he’s often written, edited, and produced many of his own projects as well.
People often talk about Criterion releases as “film school in a box,” and that term also basically describes a Soderbergh commentary track. He talks about film stocks, camera lenses, films he’s ripped off, production difficulties, editing woes, and working with actors. Sometimes you even get a fight. If you’ve never heard his conversation with Lem Dobbs for The Limey, have a listen. Dobbs wasn’t happy with Soderbergh’s take on his script and goes head-to-head with him during the recording. It’s about as close to the process as you can get.
