Adding Up the Gestures: What We See of Harry Lime

Orson Welles's long-delayed entrance as back-from-the-dead Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949) occurs in a heavily shadowed Vienna doorway. Like so much else in the film's skewed, rubble-strewn world, the doorway and its mysterious concealed occupant appear at a tilt. Director Carol Reed gives Harry a precarious relation to solid ground, both as actual presence and as relentless topic of speculation. He has been briefly sighted on a couple of occasions before his suspenseful nocturnal unveiling, but from a far distance and turned away from us. Until now he has been the nameless "third man," a perplexing figure who appeared when Lime was apparently struck dead by a car. Lime's first significant gesture in the film is a static one. Although he is concealed in an entryway, his smartly polished black wing-tip shoes protrude sufficiently to catch the light and attract the camera's notice. The shoes seem to hold an intention of their own, or rather to gather into themselves all the unknown, withheld intentions of the man rising invisibly above them (standing stock still in perfectly creased dress pants). The camera settles in for a prolonged view of his lower body at cobblestone level but endows his shoes with the lustrous magnitude of discrete entities, as they remain poised (for what imminent business?) two steps above the street.

By staking out a surveillance space so near to Lime's feet, the camera turns the shoes into a condensed surface of secrecy (Vienna's essence, writ small). Thus, the camera is conspicuously involved in the gesturing process. Its pointing amplifies the shoes' capacity to point in their own right. The spectator is instantly alerted to the importance of any shift in the shoes' position, however minute. For all of our uncertainty about the story's latest turn, we suddenly need to move inside the objects' life and partake of their power to make something happen. The stasis is taut and pregnant with future assertiveness. The immaculate shoes also declare, with panache, an improbable victory over Vienna's dust and filth. A magical path to the shoes is suddenly created on the cobblestones glittering damply in the moonlight. We note the path's existence when a cat—emerging at exactly the right instant—proceeds to follow it. This cat gained prominence in the previous scene in the apartment of Anna (Alida Valli), Lime's former lover. Anna marks its exit through a window with the revelation that it "only likes Harry." The shoes seem to be gesturing, though still motionless, toward the cat; the cat responds to their signal and moves without hesitation to one of them, pressing against it as though it were a proffered treat. The delectable sight of the cat rubbing against the shoe in an act of reunion lets us know, beyond any doubt, that Harry is very much alive and that we've found him, in advance of the main characters, who are still in the dark. There is another component of gesturing in this incandescent small episode. In addition to the shoes, the cat, and the camera placement, Anton Karas's zither music performs its own highly expressive, sustained pointing. As the cat perches on the shoe, gazing upward into the statuelike, towering silence of Harry before settling—in the absence of a welcoming touch—for a bit of shoelace to nuzzle, Karas's zither erupts into a frenzy of high spirits. Before this moment, the music in the film has always seemed more alive than the scenes it accompanies, an ironic memory of a spirited but vanished Viennese past. But here it feels as though the music has finally tracked down the source of its own unkillably jaunty ebullience. Harry's sense of exemption from the dolorous moods and restraints weighing down others is akin to the zither's. Even before we're granted a good look at him, the music tells us that he possesses the key to gaiety in a disorienting, bombed-out world.

My notes on The Third Man's drama of the shoe...