Society as Swindle in “The Third Man” (1949)

The so-called “third man factor” is a phenomenon in which people in dire circumstances experience the presence of an extra person in their midst who gives comfort and aid when it’s most needed—a guardian angel, perhaps, or some figure of divine intervention. Harry Lime seems to have played just such a role in the lives of Holly Martins and Anna Schmidt. But is Lime from heaven or from hell? Perhaps a less-than-angelic third man might estrange rather than bring together, muddle rather than clarify, adulterate rather than help. And indeed, as a black market middle-man, Lime has the devilish power to intervene in people’s lives for the worse—like a narrator who edits out characters and manipulates the plot. Wes & Erin discuss the 1949 classic film “The Third Man,” about friendship and betrayal, and about the stories we tell ourselves in order to love, survive, kill, or even die. 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But is Lime from heaven or from hell? Perhaps a less than angelic third man might estrange rather than bring together, muddle rather than clarify and adulterate rather than help. And indeed, as a black market middleman, Lime has the devilish power to intervene in people's lives for the worse, like a narrator who edits out characters and manipulates the plot. Today we're Talking about the 1949 classic film the Third man, about friendship and betrayal and about the stories we tell ourselves in order to love, survive, kill, or even die. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. 1:28 Wes: And this is Wes Alwan. 1:30 Erin: And you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, what do you think Holly Martins was doing during the war? Was he a draft dodger? 1:43 Wes: You know, it's interesting. I never thought of that. The question never occurred to me. Do we know what Harry was doing? 1:50 Erin: Well, apparently just living in Vienna and cheating people. I mean, I think Holly says that the last time that he saw him was in September of 39. 2:00 Wes: Okay. 2:00 Erin: Sort of a significant timing there. So he's been gone for the entire. 2:04 Wes: So he was a war profiteer the entire time? 2:07 Erin: I think so. Or, you know, in training to become the world's greatest war profiteer. I don't know if that ultimately is what he is by the end, but he seems pretty. Seems to have a pretty good racket. 2:18 Wes: It's interesting because I. So as far as Holly goes, I do have trouble imagining him in the military. He does try to cultivate a kind of bad boy personality, which I don't think translates very well today. Seems a bit silly. And then there's his preoccupation with sheriffs. Right, we get that. And he's written a book about someone who's vindicating a friend who's wrongfully persecuted by a sheriff. See, these are Cowboy books that he writes. And of course, this he finds himself. So the Lone Rider of Santa Fe is a story of a man who hunted down a sheriff who was victimizing his best friend. Which of course happens to be the way the plot of the film begins. I love the reaction of Payne, who's the. I don't even know what Payne is. Is he an MP or the sidekick to Calloway? Do you know what, technically he is anyway? 3:14 Erin: I think he's a sergeant. 3:15 Wes: Okay. 3:16 Erin: Yeah. In this international police force. Sergeant. I know. As opposed to major. 3:20 Wes: Everyone's got a great name. Anyway, the Payne respond sounds anti British, sir. Very funny. So he's got a problem with authority now. Not that that rules out being in the army or something. My father would tell stories of how he would get in fist fights with his officer and. Yeah, talk about a problem with authority. Anyway, he was always fighting the powers that be when he was in the army, but yeah, there's just something. There's something about him that makes me think, no, I can't envision that. 3:50 Erin: Yeah, he has a little boy obsession with these stories of justice and, you know, standing up for the wrongfully accused. And so that would sort of suggest that his morality is a bit black and white, which is where I think he stumbles in his assessment of Harry. And yet in his relationship with Harry or Lime. I don't know what we should be calling these people, especially because I wrote throughout my notes, Holly Martin's name. I wrote as Holly rather than Martin's, even though everybody calls him Martins because Holly is such a ridiculous name, which is commented on in the film, too. 4:26 Wes: I wrote him as Holly just because I don't like the name. Martins is too generic. 4:30 Erin: Right, right. Yeah. 4:31 Wes: But then on the other hand, I wrote Harry because I could say Harry and Holly. 4:36 Erin: Yes. 4:36 Wes: And they alliterate, so. 4:38 Erin: And in fact, Anna herself makes that mistake calling Holly Harry. But there's something about Holly, too, that's suggestive of his personality. This boyish sort of frozen in time quality about him. Which is why I think that his efforts to be a tough guy or something like that are rather comical, really. He's kind of an alcoholic. Right. He's constantly getting drunk and he's broke 5:06 Wes: even though he's published all these novels. 5:09 Erin: Yeah. And they're the ones that are actually supposed to make money. Right. The pulp novels are. 5:14 Wes: Right, exactly. 5:16 Erin: The popular. 5:17 Wes: So he can't give a lecture on the modern novel and stream of consciousness and whatever. But he also isn't making money with his pulp Novels that people know about. 5:26 Erin: Yeah, right. Maybe the suggestion is that they're out of fashion and that he's out of step with his time, just as he's sort of living in this perpetual adolescence, which seems to color his view of Harry for most of the film. Maybe these stories that he's writing are, you know, about cowboys and sheriffs and all of this are. Have fallen out of favor in post war malaise and corruption. But anyway, yeah, it's a sort of a. It just. It made me wonder. On the one hand, he has this huge problem with authority, which Harry seems to have encouraged. On the other hand, he seems to see the world in these black and white moral terms, which would suggest that you, for instance, dodge the draft or that you probably think, you know, Nazis are bad. But who knows with him? He's a little ambiguous. 6:17 Wes: Yeah. This is puzzling, now that you mention it. A man of his age would be. Is he in his 30s or 40s? 6:24 Erin: I think he's in his. I think he's in the 1940s version of his 30s. 6:30 Wes: Which looks like 50s. 6:31 Erin: Which looks like 50s. But it's Joseph Cotten. He has a. You know, he's appealing. Not as appealing as Orson Welles, but that's another story. 6:43 Wes: Well, I think now it occurs to me that Graham Greene, who I love the two novels of his that I've read, Brighton Rock and End of the Affair. 6:52 Erin: End of the Affair, End of the Affair. 6:55 Wes: And he wrote a good screenplay here. And that's interesting because often that doesn't go well when a novelist tries to write a screenplay. But as William Faulkner found out. Yeah. It strikes me that maybe he's being clever with the name. So Holly's L's are sort of like R's, right? Holly and Harry. So that they perhaps are alter egos in some sense. And Harry is the real deal. Real. Not the leal. The real deal. He's got the R's. Harry is the real deal. And Holly is a hologram. I don't know. What does Martin associate to? There's the bird. And then I want to say fake, but my vocabulary is failing me. Is there another alternate meaning for the word Martin? 7:43 Erin: Small Eurasian bird. Any of various birds of the swallow family. 7:48 Wes: Yeah. 7:49 Erin: I spent more time with Lime than with Martin, which actually, I spent a lot of time with the word Lime. 7:57 Wes: Yeah, right. But, yeah, let's discuss that when we get to it. But for some reason I was associating to fake or something like that. But, yeah, he's a replica. It seems apparent from context that he knows that Harry is into rackets and the black market, but that he doesn't know the extent of it. So he seems to have this strong moral compass, I guess, when it comes to taking penicillin away from children. 8:23 Erin: That's where he draws the line. 8:24 Wes: Yeah, that's where he draws the line. 8:26 Erin: But if it was just tires or sugar, then he's like, come on, haven't we all resold tires at a premium 8:35 Wes: in the aftermath of the war? Haven't we all done the black market thing? Yeah. And it occurred to me he and Anna are quite naive. And then I thought of the name Calloway, because Calloway is not actually Callow, they are. So I think because Harry turns out to be such a bad guy in the end, and I don't know if the person that they say that they knew was better. Holly is very sentimental about Harry when he thinks he's dead. He was the best friend I ever had. And then Calloway accuses him of sounding like a dime store novel or something like that, being too sentimental. But it's clear that Harry was always. He had the ability to fix things, I think, is what. What Holly says. So he was doing this before the war. I can imagine them as teenagers doing this, that or the other. Right. Holly seems to admire that. So he admires this darker side. But on the other hand, he won't go the whole way. 9:31 Erin: In a private moment with Anna, Holly talks about their relationship as boys. And Anna asks, was he clever when he was a boy? And Holly says, I suppose so. He could fix anything. Which is just such a wonderfully ambiguous phrase because at first we think, you know, he maybe was good at fixing things that broke. Right. 9:50 Wes: Which is what I thought when I first heard it. 9:52 Erin: Yeah. Yes. And she says, what sort of things? Like, you know, cars or whatever. Right. Oh, little things. How to put your temperature up before an exam. The best cribs. How to avoid this and that. And then Anna says, he fixed my papers for me. He heard that the Russians were repatriating people like me who came from Czechoslovakia. He knew the right person straight away for forging stamps. And then Holly says, when he was 14, he taught me the three card trick. That's growing up fast. And Anna says, he never grew up. The world grew up around him, that's all, and buried him. You know, it occurs to me that the only person whose opinion of Harry really changes over the course of the film is Holly. I mean, Calloway is wrong about Harry being dead, but other than that, he's right about who Harry is. Anna is wrong, but her opinion of him does not change. Regardless of evidence. Holly's is the only one, you know, and all the other guys around Harry seem to know who he is. And, you know, they all have differing stories about him, but their opinions about him don't change either. And yet what Holly's telling us here about him is remarkably consistent with the guy he grew up to be. You know, so somehow doing these things when you're a kid, putting your temperature up before an exam so, you know, getting out of an exam, the best cribs and how to avoid things, that's what made me think of this idea of draft dodging. All of these things have to do with getting out of tests or getting out of the position that an authority figure might put you in if they had so much access to each other. You know, I'm kind of imagining them in like a boarding school, boys, boarding school kind of environment that is not in the script. But it's just, you know, there seems to be so much intimacy between them in this kind of boys school way. And Graham Greene, as a, you know, as an Englishman probably would have that. 11:36 Wes: Was he an Eton guy? 11:38 Erin: I'm not sure, but he must have been. Right. So this whole idea of, you know, your whole life being organized around getting out of things or somehow trying to evade authority or stick it to authority, and then by having taught him the three card trick, I was thinking about that with the three card. I usually refer to it as the three card Monte. You usually need a shill for that. So he taught Hollywood maybe what these, what the three card trick was about. In other words, that he was being scammed by somebody, or maybe he taught him how to perform it with him. In other words, that Holly was kind of an accomplice, that maybe Harry was pulling the scam on other boys in the school and Holly was the shill to help him pull it off. But somehow it seems that all of this is in good fun if you do it when you're a kid. And then there are acceptable ways that you could scam people as an adult with things like sugar and tires. But Holly can't extend himself to see that Harry might get involved deeper and deeper with more insidious black market items, even though he seems to have been a con artist from the moment Holly met him. So it's odd that his opinion goes through the only transformation of the film when he kind of knew he had this guy's number all along. But in one instance, he sees him as a hero for doing these things. And in another, he's a villain. 13:05 Wes: Yeah. It's interesting because now you have me looking up Three Card Monte. So it's a confidence game in which the victims or marks are tricked into betting a sum of money on the assumption that they can find the money card. Okay, well, it's like a shell game 13:19 Erin: where you're moving the. 13:20 Wes: It's a shell game. Okay. There's a connection here between the third man and the three card. 13:25 Erin: Exactly. 13:28 Wes: Which I did not make. 13:29 Erin: Well, you need three people to pull it off as well. Right. You need the Conner, the shill. And the person being conned is the person being conned, Joseph Cotten. Because if Harry taught him how to recognize this trick, in other words, Harry gave him the blueprint for who Harry became. And still Holly's somehow getting conned in its full form. 13:48 Wes: 3 card Monte is an example of a classic short con in which a shill pretends to conspire with the mark to cheat the dealer while in fact doing the reverse. So they're cheating the mark. Holly is, in a sense, in the position of the mark. Right, because he gets. He thinks he's coming over to be part of a racket. Right. To be part of a con, essentially. But he's the one who gets conned because. Yeah. What's the purpose of doing that to Holly? Why do they need to trick Holly as part of this? They need Harry to seem dead. 14:19 Erin: But, yeah, I was wondering that myself. I think why all of this happens on the day that Holly is supposed to show up doesn't make any sense to me. Okay, why do this now? 14:31 Wes: That doesn't make any sense to me. And also. Right. He's about to leave when Kurtz, Baron Kurtz, basically rings him up and says, meet me at the Mozart Cafe, and then creates all this suspicion in him. So what's the point of that? I mean, he brings a book as if he's a fan. Maybe he's just a fan who wanted to meet Holly. The book, I think, had been given to him by Harry. So I don't know how much of a real fan he is and how much of a pretext that is, but it's because of Kurtz that Holly ends up staying. So it's almost like the way all this unfolds, they really ensure that Holly is going to keep asking questions and that they're going to get found out. 15:08 Erin: Well, it's as though the. The purpose of all of this is Holly's moral education or advancement, that he's going to finally grow up it's clear that Harry doesn't trust him enough. You know, he might have gone to har. To Holly from the beginning and said, listen, I had to fake my own death because they're after me and given him some story about how he was just involved in sugar and tires or whatever and not tell him the full truth, get Holly on his side and have Holly still do the job for him and then leave. Instead of. He allows Holly to be drawn into this whole thing, giving time for Holly to learn the truth about him from Calloway, and then only appears when it's kind of too late. Maybe it's best not to look at the apparatus of that because I think there's suspension of disbelief involved. That has to. Unless we're missing some really big and important part of the way that the story is meant to function, that is Harry trying to manipulate Holly in some particular way. If that isn't the case, then maybe it's just this suspension of disbelief thing that all of this is happening when Holly just happens to be there to find it out. 16:11 Wes: Yeah. I can buy it being a coincidence, actually, but. So it is interesting. Kurtz says it's wonderful how you keep the tension in the novels, which, of course, is what's happening in that moment. Right. The tension is, he could have left and that would be the end of the story. But the tension is being maintained by. By what Kurtz is doing and then by what Holly will do. But I guess just while we're mentioning things that are confusing in looking over. So I just. Like, after I watched the movie, I looked over the screenplay or the script. Someone created, like, a shooting script that seems taken from the movie. I don't know if people are using AI now to basically take films, because if you try to read the original screenplay, I don't know if you've tried this in one of our episodes. It's. It doesn't work because so much changes during the shooting. Right. And so I'm often using these transcripts, just finding a transcript online, but that's usually unattributed, but they seem to be getting fancier. And that's describing the shots, everything shot for shot and so on. So just looking at that and going over all my notes again, I thought, oh, yeah, I don't really know. Why did Harry betray Anna to the Russians? Because that comes out in the Ferris wheel scene. I don't know if you remember that, because I didn't really fully understand that until looking at the script. And I was confused by it. And then I asked ChatGPT. I just said, why does Harry betray Anna to the Russians? And ChatGPT tried to claim that Harry doesn't betray Anna to the Russians. It's the opposite, blah, blah, blah. He helped her with her papers. And I said, and it gives very long rationale. This is what I love about AI. It's just like the ultimate rationalizer. Once it's on to some point, it can just produce a wealth of evidence. And then I just said, well, in the Ferris wheel scene, Harry says he's only safe in the Russian zone. And Holly says, oh, so that's how they found out about Anna. 18:16 Erin: He traded information for his security, which 18:20 Wes: should have been obvious to me, but anyway. And then. ChatGPT, yeah, you've caught the key line that gives the game away, blah, blah, blah. 18:31 Erin: I love it when I get complimented by AI yeah. 18:34 Wes: And then later on it says, so my earlier answer was too soft. It kind of admits that it was wrong. So that should have been pretty clear and obvious to me. But it was just another thing I was confused by. And I'm just saying that because there are. It is quite intricate and the pacing is really fast with the Ferris wheel scene, the speed of that dialogue and the background noise and stuff, I really had to pause and take notes. And even then I just went back to this transcript screenplay thing and just analyzed everything that was in the speech. And it's just a lot that happens very quickly. So it's an intricate plot and there are some confusing aspects. I don't think it's really interferes with my suspension of disbelief at any point, but there's an intricacy to it. 19:20 Erin: This is one of my favorite movies, and this is the first time watching it that I noticed that the voiceover at the beginning was not Joseph Cotton's voice or Calloway's voice. And I looked it up and I was like, oh, that's Carol Reed. And there's a possibility that I could have seen an American version of it with a Joseph Cotten vo. But instead, I know I've seen this version before, so. But the memory is hard. It's really hard to keep track of everything too, because the circumstances of the central mystery, you know, the car accident scene, involve so many people. You know, it's the third man, but it's really like the fifth man, plus the porter is a sixth man, plus Holly is a seventh man, you know, because there's also the doctor who was walking by the fact that his own chauffeur hit him. The porter having seen it, the. It's an incredibly complex. Plus, the one who was actually killed. Right. The dead body in Harry Lime's grave, who turns out to be Joseph Harbin, one of many Josephs mentioned in the film, I think, including Joseph Harbin. There are three Josephs as well. This is sort of maybe a little bit of a stretch, but Anna is an actress at the Josefstadt Theater, which is in the Josefstadt district, I believe, or neighborhood or something like that, which is named after Emperor Joseph I. And then Joseph Harbin's body is pulled behind the Joseph statue, which I've actually been to all the locations where all of this takes place. So, you know, the entrance to what supposedly Harry's building is right there. It's actually a palace. 20:50 Wes: Did you take a picture of yourself stepping out in front of a car? 20:53 Erin: I did not, but I did take a picture of the doorway. Those beautiful statues of the four women, you know, the two on either side flanking the doorway, are now white. So I don't know if they were just covered in soot or something like that because they look almost like painted black or they look gray or made out of something that isn't white stone. But anyway, Joseph Harbin is pulled behind the Emperor Joseph's statue, which is a statue of Joseph ii, another emperor, the one from Amadeus, who says, too many notes. You know, the Mozart and Salieri emperor equestrian, huge equestrian statue that Joseph Harbin has pulled behind. So there are sort of like three. It's like Joseph I, Joseph ii, and then Harbin is Joseph iii. So he's also kind of the third man. Anyway, I thought a lot about duplication in this film, and I have plenty more to say about that. But I'll stop there for now. But it's very confusing to keep everything straight. And, yeah, each one of the witnesses or the people who participated, Kurtz, Popescu, the Romanian doctor. Winkel, Winkel, Winkel. And then we never meet the chauffeur. But those three, their interviews, they all also give, like, differing pieces of information, different glosses on Harry's character. Also, like Dr. Winkel has Baron Kurtz's dog, or it's actually Dr. Vinkel's dog, not Baron Kurtz's. So I remember as a kid not really understanding fully what was going on there or what had happened. 22:24 Wes: Ultimately, yeah, I had the same confusion as you about the commentator. I had the impression that it was Holly. And then I went back and looked at the. Just looking at the script, and there's a moment where the narrator says, I was going to tell you about Holly Martins, An American came all the way here to visit his friend. To visit a friend of his. Martins was broke, so a friend of his. Harry Lime. Martins was broke, and Lime offered him some sort. I don't know, some sort of job. And it's a very casual, kind of jaunty, you know, ironic and funny tone. The whole beginning is kind of. There's a fair bit of sarcasm in the way the commentator starts things. So it does say we. So we'd run anything if people wanted it enough and had the money to pay. Of course, a situation like that. And then there's a shot, as the commentator is saying this, of a body floating in the water. A situation like that doesn't tempt amateurs. You know, they can't stay the course like a professional. So it does sound like the commentator is in on things. Yet another. 23:28 Erin: He's the 14th man in the operation. 23:33 Wes: The film isn't as comedic as the introductory tone makes it. You know, the tone that's set in the beginning isn't held. I mean, there are. I guess there's some funny things that happen, although maybe not. 23:46 Erin: Oh, I think so. I think there's a lot of silly. There's a lot of strange silliness, especially with Crabbin. 23:52 Wes: Yeah. There's the lecture, Paine punches him in the face at one point, but then is quick, very polite after that, and helps him up. Let me help you up, sir. 24:01 Erin: Right, right. The drunkenness almost immediately, Holly gets drunk in that scene. That really kind of sets the tone, too. So there's a. And the music. The Roger Ebert review of this film, which I revisited yesterday. It's in his Greatest Films collection of essays. He opens the review by saying something like, has there ever been a better soundtrack or a soundtrack better suited to its film? And he describes it as something like jaunty, but without joy. 24:32 Wes: Interesting. 24:33 Erin: Which I think is a really good way to put it, you know, so there's a. The soundtrack provides a kind of lightness. 24:37 Wes: So it's sort of a Django Reinhardt style guitar. Is that the. 24:42 Erin: It's a zither. 24:43 Wes: Oh, okay. 24:43 Erin: Yeah. And an actual Viennese zither player. Famous zither player picked up off the street by Carol Reed, ended up composing all the entire score. And so that contributes too, I think. And that also contributes to the sense of speed in the film because it's just the one instrument. And it's often. It almost has, like a silent movie type score in that it's almost reproducing Footsteps and people running, you know, chase scenes, you know, where it's almost has the effect of speeding up the action. You know, you get sort of knocked around by it. I think. 25:19 Wes: What is the atmosphere that it's trying to capture? I think there's a kind of. There's kind of a romantic. There's supposed to be something romantic about post war Vienna and the ruins and the moral. Let's call it flexibility up to a certain point. There's something romantic about that, I think. And the film was shot and actually shot in the. In the actual rubble and ruins of Vienna. So that, that. And that's the way the commentator sets things up in the. In the beginning, something about desperation and what people will do in desperation, but then some of the people aren't really that desperate. So when Holly says to Kurtz, police have the idea that he's mixed up in some sort of racket. Kurtz says, everyone in Vienna is. We all sell cigarettes and that kind of thing. I tell you, I've done things that would have seemed unthinkable before the war. And then you think you're going to hear about prostitution or something. Instead I sold some tires on the black market. I wonder what my father would have said. Of course, he's much worse than that. So there's this idea that people are just trying to get by and the normal mechanisms of things have broken down and are finding a way, and it's morally flexible or compromised or whatever. But it's not so terrible. It's an environment in which the necessity to survive has overridden other considerations. But the reality is, right, it's just about being predatory. At least for Harry. It sounds like for these guys, it's more than we got to get by. It's, let's dilute the penicillin and make 80 pounds a shot or whatever it is. Even if children die, the romance of the morally flexible aftermath in a place that's been destroyed quickly gets obliterated. It turns out not to be that way. So there's something. There's a kind of disenchantment in the arc of the film. But we start out disenchanted in a way because it was a terrible war and this is the aftermath. It's destructive. But in that disenchantment there's a romance. But then we get deprived even of that romance by the end of the movie. 27:23 Erin: I think certainly the romance that we see, I mean, there's a sort of general romance to the idea of it. But then the people who are able to appreciate that or take advantage of that aspect of Vienna are those who are either not living there or who are not making money on the black market. And therefore in a financial position. It seems to not be affected by the negative elements of this place. Right. So Harry, when they get on the Ferris wheel, talks about how the kids used to love to ride the Ferris wheel. Now none of them have the money. Money to go on it. But of course he can go on and have this confrontation with Holly and feel sad. 27:58 Wes: He does. He doesn't have his. In enough of his indigestion pills. 28:02 Erin: That's right. That's right. Yeah. And Baron Kurtz is meeting. You know, is playing at the Casanova Club or meeting Holly in places called the Mozart Cafe, which get at this sort of faded neoclassical glory of the city. You know, what kind of people are going and seeing Anna at the Josefstadt Theater in that comedy of manners? Probably just the wealthy. There seems to be a play on this, too, in terms of speech. The black marketeers. Is that a term? Black marketeers, the bad guys. They have the ability to talk to Holly, or they're always kind of talking to Holly freely, even if they come up with sort of different versions of the same story. There's a kind of flexibility about them that seemed to me to be indicative of Harry being able to get away by escaping out the back of a bombed building. Like the rubble allows that escape route. 28:57 Wes: Right. 28:58 Erin: And the sewers, using the sewers. Whereas the porter can't get out. The porter is bound by virtue of his job to this building, which does seem intact and which is servicing these black market people because Harry is living there, but which seems to be servicing them specifically because it is an intact building and he is therefore murdered in the building. There's this idea of not speaking, not being able to speak. The porter's limited by not knowing very much English. And so Anna is there to translate between the porter and Holly. But also, we're told that the porter was too afraid to testify at the. I guess it was the inquest for Harry's death. So he didn't testify to say that there was a third man there. There's this sense that these ordinary people can't speak or that they're afraid to speak or that speech will betray them somehow. I think the narrator says at the beginning that all of these forces are coming in to occupy the central sector, and yet they all don't speak each other's language. There's the French, the Americans, the Russians, and the. In the English. So I guess The Americans and the English speak the same language. And the only thing they have in common is a smattering of German or something like that. So there's this idea that the good guys and the, say, ordinary people are maybe limited by their access to knowledge and their ability to communicate with each other. But these black market people, for them, the city has endless possibilities because they have a way of going out back doors or of. Or they have maybe a coalition or they have money that can get them in on the Russian side, even if they. Maybe they can't speak Russian. But you know, that like they. They seem to be the only ones who can travel with impunity, who can converse, who can make themselves understood, and therefore who can enjoy a city which for everybody else is closing in around them. I wanted to just talk about the stage money, as Holly calls it, the money that. The army money. So he has even a different currency. You know, I don't know how Holly fits in with all this. And I'm not sure if I'm characterizing Interpol the right way, because they're free too, in the city in a way that the ordinary people seem not to be free. But I think maybe it's a gradient. 31:08 Wes: The international police are limited. 31:11 Erin: They're limited. But the opening narration tells us they're hobbled by not being able to communicate with the other people. Yet they don't seem as hobbled as the regular. Like they're not going to get murdered the way that this porter is going to get murdered. You know, they have some authority which enables them to be. To exist a little bit easier. And they have their own money. Now, this money doesn't really translate to any of the places within the actual city. Right. Because at some point, Hawley's told he can't use that money I think at a bar. 31:41 Wes: Well, Anna tells him at the Casanova, they don't take army money. 31:44 Erin: They don't take army money. Yeah. And he calls it. 31:46 Wes: It's money that basically Calloway is near the beginning, stuffed into Martin's overcoat pocket. 31:53 Erin: Right, Right. Yeah. And there's this whole idea too of Interpol descending and creating these sort of false conditions within the city. So they're not even in the real. Right. They're in stage Vienna with their stage money. That doesn't actually work in the city. It's the regular people who seem to be getting shafted every which way. And the Interpol and the black market people are exempt in different ways, but both exempt from that kind of the hard lives of I'd imagine, of the people who live there. 32:23 Wes: Yeah. I think it seems like the military policing and the military law that the city is under are ineffectual. And that in part has to do with its international character. And as you pointed out, the commentator makes a lot in the beginning of the fact that you have people who can't communicate with each other, trying to cooperate as a single police force, essentially. And they also have other ulterior motives. So the Russians want to claim Anna as theirs because she's Czechoslovakian, which is a weird. You know, she's got to go to the Russian sector of the city. It's a weird preoccupation to have. Right. You got to be in my sector. So there's a way in which the varieties of nationalism are competing even as they try to be internationalist in a way and govern the city from that standpoint. So Vienna isn't, you know, Vienna has to be Viennese again fully before it's going to function, I think, is the idea. 33:20 Erin: Yeah, it does seem to be, you know, a symbol for all of Europe. And this idea, these types of silly preoccupations like we want anon in our sector are, you know, one would say, indicative of the way that Europe was carved up after World War II by FDR, Stalin and Churchill. You know, you get this part of this country, and I'll take that, and then we'll split Berlin down the middle, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, and if you're on the wrong side during the splitting process, then sucks for you. 33:52 Wes: Yeah. There were massive dislocations of millions of people from one country to another based on who ended up getting what. But, yeah, based on ethnicity. 34:03 Erin: After the war, it seems that it's the regular Joes. Right. Who are ultimately the victims of this. It's not going to be the people who are doing the carving or the people who feel that the rules don't apply to them. 34:14 Wes: Yeah. So it amplifies the ordinary. Inequalities of class get amplified in this circumstance. Right. Thought you were born. 34:21 Erin: Yes, yes. 34:22 Wes: Where. Right. You have. All the rich people can go to the theater. But also. 34:26 Erin: Yes. 34:27 Wes: Right. The beginning of the film, you know, you get all these shots of. Yeah. People looking very poor and desperate. 34:32 Erin: Right. And also just. And then these. These black market guys who maybe worked their racket, you know, and put themselves in a position to be able to go to the theater, who were not, you know, those seem to be like the social climbers in a way, who were just able to luck out during the war somehow and come into a good racket. 34:51 Wes: Yeah. In ordinary times, it would just be organized. It would just be organized crime. Right. But it almost seems a little bit more forgivable. It's not like Holly has come over to be part of the Mafia. It's just there's a more of an entrepreneurial spirit if they're just doing tires and things like that. And because social order is broken down, it's more forgivable. 35:12 Erin: Maybe this is related to Holly's idealization of Harry. So, in a way, you are. You're a successful little entrepreneur. If you could figure out how to survive under these conditions, and nobody would really fault you for it, because everybody's suffering. And so you're sort of making something of your suffering. You're pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps rather than just suffering with everybody else and following the rules or something like that. And so, you know, we see that Holly admires Harry for being able to get out of, say, tests that the other boys had to take. And he sort of admires Harry's ingenuity for being able to escape that task, that. That enforcement of authority. 35:55 Wes: Yeah. And in the. In the beginning with Calloway, you know, he wants to argue with Calloway about the seriousness of the crimes. Right. So it's just some petty racket with gasoline or something. And then Calloway accuses Lime of murder. And then that's when Holly tries to punch him. And later in the film, when Harry is finally getting wise, Holly. Sorry. When Holly is finally getting wise, Calloway will say, I told you to go away, Martins. This isn't Santa Fe. I'm not a sheriff. And you, you aren't a cowboy. You've been blundering around with the worst bunch of racketeers in Vienna, your precious Harry's friends. And now you're wanted for murder, which is another confusing thing. I don't understand the role of that little boy in getting them. 36:37 Erin: Oh, yeah. He accuses Holly of having killed the porter. 36:44 Wes: Has he put up to it? 36:46 Erin: No, I think he just, you know, he's seen Holly with the porter, and he just says, I saw that guy with him. Or he would maybe something like, he was the last one with him. My German is not that good. 36:56 Wes: How's your toddler German? 36:58 Erin: A little better. 37:01 Wes: It's romanticization of little light organized crime. But once you get to the real thing, then it's much more sinister. I don't know. Am I connecting to the point that you were just making? 37:13 Erin: Definitely. It Makes me want to think again about language, about speech and about that kind of flexibility. Because I think a consistent. Or maybe it's not that consistent. Maybe that's why I can't work it out. But I do think that there is an argument being made here about language. We have Holly calling Calloway Callahan, which puts him in a different location. As Calloway points out, he says, I'm English, not Irish, you know, so Callahan would be an Irish name. You know, we have Anna confusing the names, calling Holly Harry. We have the, you know, the confusion of the wrong body in the grave. Right. Joseph Harbin for Harry. We have the confusion of the number of people at the scene of the accident. There's much made of the confusion actually, of American geography. They keep referring to Texas as the location for all of Holly's novels, including the Lone Rider of Santa Fe and Oklahoma Kid, but they keep referring to Texas. Right. Obviously, there's the. You know, we find out that there's the dilution of the penicillin going on. So there's a kind of passing something off or something else. It's not exactly a confusion, but I think it's sort of related. This adulteration or this mistaken identity or something like that sort of extends to this idea of the dilution, which I looked up. I don't want to get us off track on that because I want to stick with language for a second. But I looked up how that would be done. And the other thing I was going to say is I noticed that in that first conversation, that bar scene. First bar scene with Calloway and Holly, when he lists his two. He names two novels of his. After he says that, he writes cheap novelettes. He says the Lone Rider of Santa Fe, which comes up several times in the film. And it occurred to me that rider is also a homophone for rider. R I, D E R could be mistaken for W R I, T E, R. Right? And then death at Double X Ranch. And then he, imitating an English accent, says raunch instead of ranch, which then becomes a different word. It becomes actually, in American English, it becomes R A, U, N, C, H. Like raunchy. I'm not sure what to say about these things, but. But maybe we can make something of them in Part two. These confusions, these what. What are they? 39:29 Wes: The whole movie is a grift. 39:33 Erin: I want to say something a little bit better than that before we close out these linguistic blips or, you know, we also. We have. The other thing I just wanted to say about that was The Crabbin, the CRS of ghq. You know, the Alphabet soup. Cultural Re Education section, the importance of language. And yet the inability to properly hear each other or make ourselves understood or know where we are. Being able to locate things in language seems to be difficult. Being able to locate people or identify people properly seems to be difficult. All these linguistic problems seem to be at the center. 40:12 Wes: Yeah. So language is a racket, potentially, but at the very least, language is falsifying. But at the very least, we get the idea that this cultural stuff is a racket. So Crabbin. He doesn't know Martins. It's just based on Paine's testimony. He's gonna have him suddenly give a lecture on the novel. So Crabbin says, cultural Re Education section. Propaganda. Just what he's doing. Very important in a place like this. We do a little show each week. Last week we did Hamlet, and the week before we had something. And then Payne says. Striptease, sir? Yes. Hindu dances. Thank you, Sergeant. First opportunity we've had of making an American author welcome. Yeah. So we get this idea that the Cultural Re Education center is not all it's cracked up to be. Then he makes a remark about Hawley's novels being popular there, even though he's never read any, and he doesn't know that. And so you could also say writing popular novels is a kind of racket. It's not the real thing. 41:19 Erin: Right. 41:20 Wes: It doesn't match up to a more serious literary pretension or aspiration. It's just about making money with silly little stories. I don't know. Is that the way to put it? That's not a great way to put it. You know, writing for money without any concern for the craft, let's say, or the. Well, no, maybe that's not the best way to put it either. Anyway, you get what I mean? 41:45 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's stop there, and we'll keep talking about the importance of language and identity, and then we'll get to maybe a more profound look at both Harry and Anna in Part two. Thank you. 42:01 Wes: Thank you. 42:05 Erin: And thanks to everyone who listened. 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