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Vienna après-guerre, "the classic period of the black market." The gulf between Old and New World in a freshly quartered city (cf. Wilder's A Foreign Affair), from the canted vantage of the writer of The Lone Rider of Santa Fe and Death At Double X Ranch. The visiting Yank (Joseph Cotten) is a pulp novelist not familiar with "the stream of consciousness," a Boy Scout in a land of racketeers yet also the only one to sense something not right about his estranged friend's death. Tenebrous streets, shimmering cobblestones, corkscrew staircases, the very embodiment of moral ambiguity, plus a needling zither for a nervous system. Jittery gnomish faces contrast with the sardonic dryness of the English major (Trevor Howard), untranslated languages and forgeries swirl around the stage comedienne with a doleful air (Alida Valli). Harry Lime and his Fascinating Fascism, a spotlight falls on him and who's there but Orson Welles himself as the jaunty Devil of Graham Greene's Catholic fable, cheerfully trying to convince the hapless hero that "nobody thinks in terms of human beings." The necessary end of innocence, a Carol Reed theme in its most vibrant manifestation, couched in a conscious study of Wellesian betrayal and clutter. Up in the Ferris wheel and down in the sewers, the value of "mixing fact and fiction." (A panning camera in a high-angled view of the plaza provides a documentary glimpse of the rubble.) Accusing tyke and balloon hawker are mementos from Lang, Casablanca adjusted to the Cold War is the effect. The horror of diluted penicillin, the enigma of a woman's devotion, the bullet that seals a broken friendship. "Death's at the bottom of everything. Leave that to the professionals." "Mind if I use that line in my next Western?" A work of famous perfections, opening and closing in cemeteries, closely studied by Polanski and Wajda. The finest critique is Welles' own in Mr. Arkadin. Cinematography by Robert Krasker. With Bernard Lee, Ernst Deutsch, Paul Hörbiger, Erich Ponto, Siegfried Breuer, Wilfrid Hyde-White, and Hedwig Bleibtreu. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |