Plausibles and Implausibles

In a recent conversation with an old friend from my film school days, we got to talking about The Third Man, the 1949 classic directed by Carol Reed, written by Graham Greene, and starring Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard, and Alida Valli. (For those who haven't seen it, the film is a bit too complicated to summarize here; suffice it to say that it's a thriller involving black-market intrigue in postwar Vienna. Also, if you're new to the film, be warned that spoilers follow.)

Near the end, Welles's Harry Lime, the charming villain of the piece, is about to rendezvous with his friend of 20 years, Holly Martins (Cotten), at a café, unaware that he's stepping into a trap. Holly, disgusted with what he's learned of Lime (that the diluted penicillin the latter peddles on the black market has claimed a number of innocent victims, including children), has decided to cooperate with military policeman Calloway (Howard), whose men are gathered in the shadows surrounding the café, ready to nab Lime when he appears. As Lime enters the establishment, he overhears his lover (Valli) denouncing Martins as a police informer. She yells at Lime to run. A memorable chase through the sewers of Vienna ensues and Lime is ultimately shot by Holly.

My friend, who had seen the film many times before (as have I), found that during his most recent viewing, this question suddenly occurred to him: Why does Harry Lime go into that café? Up to this point the film has shown him to be a man of considerable cunning and shrewdness, even faking his own death to elude capture. Why would he expose himself so foolishly at this point? And is this action so implausible as to undermine one's suspension of disbelief and send the film careening off the rails?

With my friend's question in mind, I rewatched the last third of the film again, and it does seem to me that Greene and Reed at least try (perhaps unsuccessfully) to lay the groundwork for the scene in an earlier one in which Lime and Holly meet at Vienna's famous Ferris wheel and have a heart-to-heart chat in one its compartments as it slowly ascends to a dizzying height. The emphasis of this scene is on Lime’s utter venality and disregard for human life. But as ruthless and amoral as he is—he chillingly calls his victims “suckers and mugs” and questions what difference it would make if one of those “dots” on the ground below were to "stop moving forever”—he's also shown to be oddly sentimental about his longtime friendship with Holly. Even after Holly reveals that he has talked to the police and that they “dug up [Lime’s] coffin,” Lime, though clearly shaken, ends up saying Holly remains the only one in the city he can trust. He suggests they meet again, though warning Holly that he’d best not bring the police.

It would seem, then, that Lime (whether plausibly or not) thinks that Holly would never betray him—and indeed it is only after Calloway takes Holly to a hospital to show him some of Lime’s victims that Holly agrees to act as a decoy. Otherwise, he was ready to leave Vienna. And when the climactic meeting finally comes, Reed does show Lime exercising a certain measure of caution: he emerges from the shadows atop a wreckage pile overlooking the street and carefully surveys the scene before approaching the café, which he enters from the side door, not from the street entrance. This demonstrates a deliberate effort on Reed and Greene's part to cover the credibility bases, and there is so much else that is good about the film—from the moral issues it raises to its crisp editing, effective use of chiaroscuro and canted camera angles (perhaps Welles's influence), overall plotting, and memorable performances—that most viewers, at least on one viewing, are likely to overlook the possible gap in logic. And let's face it: the filmmakers were probably counting on most people seeing it only once and not having a second thought about whether Harry Lime's fatal error is really plausible or not. That was how both my friend and I had experienced it even after repeated viewings.

Truth to tell, I don’t think a lot of movies in a somewhat realistic vein such as this one (musicals, horror, fantasy, and  science fiction films, and most comedies and action movies are another matter altogether) would withstand the plausibility test if you examine them closely enough. And even when logical lapses are pretty obvious, it becomes a question of whether enough virtues remain to compensate for them. The typical film, especially a heavily plot-driven one, is such a compressed form of storytelling that resorting to shortcuts and a certain amount of narrative sleight of hand is almost inevitable.

Hitchcock, not surprisingly, was particularly disdainful of those he called “our friends, the plausibles.” And indeed, his films abound in improbabilities that most viewers (except for the plausibles, of course) are more than willing to forgive or overlook. My own favorite bit of Hitchcockian illogic comes near the end of Strangers on a Train, when the tennis-player hero, Guy Haines, struggles to win a match quickly so that he’ll have time to intercept the villain, Bruno Anthony, before the latter can plant an incriminating cigarette lighter and frame Guy for the murder of his wife. If time is of the essence, why does Guy try so hard to win the match? Wouldn’t it be more logical for him to throw the match and let his opponent win? That would get it over with in a hurry. But then, of course, we wouldn’t have that great sequence in which Guy’s battle on the tennis court is intercut with Bruno’s desperate efforts to retrieve the dropped lighter from a storm drain.

Critic Molly Haskell touches on this issue a bit in the new Film Comment. In an otherwise appreciative essay on Robert DeNiro, she talks about how little of Taxi Driver makes sense to her: “Why would smirky princess Betsy go on a date with creepy cabbie Travis in the first place? And why would he take her to a porn film? And then be shocked when she walks out on it and him? And then be shocked when she rejects it and him?” After mentioning a few more flaws—the sexlessness of Travis Bickle, the farcical ending, the film’s “indigestible melding of Ford and Bresson"—she concludes: “But despite all this,Travis Bickle lives, and thanks to the untethered nature of DeNiro’s instinctive performance, breathes, flourishes, threatens, as myth: the savage male underbelly endlessly renewable and terrifying." In short, while Taxi Driver is clearly not Haskell's idea of a masterpiece, it contains at least one transcendent element—DeNiro's powerful presence—that makes it worthwhile.

The Third Man may not be a masterpiece either. But in my view it comes pretty damn close, even when Harry Lime's questionable final decision is taken into account.