ENDORA YOUR ENTHUSIASM (16)

By: Mark Kingwell
August 27, 2025

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite sympathetic villains. Series edited by Heather Quinlan.

HARRY LIME

There aren’t many zither tracks that spend eleven weeks atop the Billboard music charts, but Anton Karas’s “Third Man Theme,” Der Dritte Mann, is one of them. Sanctioned narrative has it that members of the movie’s cast — Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten among them — heard Karas playing the tune in a Vienna café and knew instantly that it was perfect for Carol Reed’s noir masterpiece, perhaps the best British film of all time.

Well, maybe. It certainly comes with an impeccable pedigree: not just the cast, which also includes Trevor Howard, Bernard Lee (later an enduring Bond “M”), and Alida Valli; or the taut, cynical screenplay by Graham Greene; or even Robert Krasker’s skewy expressionist-inflected cinematography. Most of all it boasts the mysterious third man at the heart of the story. Welles’s Harry Lime appears only late and fitfully. He is a shadowy figure in every sense, reported dead to his old friend Holly, visiting post-war Vienna looking for a job. First glimpsed in a flash of window light, disappearing into thin air, he is chased by friend and foe alike into the subterranean sewers of the bleak Austrian capital.

Welles infuses the character with every ounce of his buoyant, jowly charm, complete with rakish fedora and boxy overcoat. This scheming revenant black marketer shifts from dominant absence in early stretches, a kind of human MacGuffin, into the luminous cynical centre of a godless-universe third act. In the film’s best scene, he and Holly ride on the Wiener Riesenrad, the towering ferris wheel in the city’s Prater amusement park. Gazing up at Holly, Harry muses about the value of peace and stability. “In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed. But they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance.” Tiny beat. “In Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly.” Brisk exit, zithering, past the merry-go-round.

By this time we know that Lime’s fortune and notoriety come from stolen military penicillin, diluted and sold illegally, causing countless deaths. As a cheerful defence of rat-race criminality, his justification is breathtaking and empty yet somehow also hilarious. I have tried to match the intonation and accompanying smirk of that nihilistic verdict ever since I first saw this film at a 1980s rep-cinema screening — to load my own undergraduate contempt into the word cuckoo. But really, only Welles could have delivered it — and, as Greene later reported, the American also wrote it.

After this, Harry Lime’s second life does not last very much longer. Traditional justice is done in the bleak black-and-white underground world he inhabits. But not without the death of one more decent man, the strapping MP sergeant played by Lee, an incongruous fan of Holly’s pulp western novels. So long, amigo — that’s known as collateral damage.

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ENDORA YOUR ENTHUSIASM (16)

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