The Third Man: Zone/Frontier; Gangster Films and Westerns

. . . here in the Zone categories have been blurred badly. The status of the name you miss, love, and search for has now grown ambiguous and remote, but this is even more than the bureaucracy of mass absence—some still live, some have died, but many, many have forgotten which they are. Their likenesses will not serve. Down here are only wrappings left in the light, in the dark: images of the Uncertainty . . .

—Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow.

In The Third Man, Graham Greene’s zone is the same as Pynchon’s, though about two years later, middle Europe after World War II, a time when clear and effective civil authority was not yet reestablished, and certain ambiguities and potentialities flourished as a consequence of that. When Sir Alexander Korda asked Greene to come up with a film set in Vienna, Greene had the germ of an idea, written down “twenty years back, on the flap of an envelope”—a man named Harry, buried the week before, is seen on the Strand one February day—but not much more. It took a trip to Vienna to supply the precipitant, the first result of which was not the screenplay of The Third Man but a prose narrative “treatment” Greene planned to use as a foundation for the script. That treatment was published as a novel after the film had proved a success, succeeding in the public’s attention the text it had preceded in compositional history. In this essay I will be concerned mainly with that novel blossomed from Greene’s Vienna trip, the first fruit of the excitement that Vienna awoke in Greene, though I will suggest as well that in making the film Greene and Carol Reed continued to explore what Greene had come upon in the zone. Vienna revived his enthusiasm for certain imperfectly administered terrains he had visited in movies—boweries in gangster movies and frontiers in westerns—and reminded him of a character type endemic to such sites, an effervescent, charismatic innocent whose soul didn’t age because he’d found a setting that didn’t require it, who could only be terminated, rather than taught or matured, a blithe criminal rebuttal to the theory of inevitable decline preached in the “Intimations Ode”: though for Wordsworth it’s inevitable that “Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing boy,” for Greene’s boys the only danger is jail rather than spiritual inhibition because they always go eagerly on, never grow reluctantly up. Calloway, the British MP played by Trevor Howard in the film, describing Harry Lime: “[Lime had] never grown up. Marlowe’s devils wore squibs attached to their tails: evil was like Peter Pan—it carried with it the horrifying and horrible gift of eternal youth.” Such perennial boys have a knack for finding spots in real space that leave plenty of room for free play, for a while, at least: and if the thought that opportunity is always only temporary ever makes them melancholy, melancholy never alters their course; they play out their main chance, until the last moment, when reasserted territoriality has the last word, not a consummate word, just the last one.

* * *

Though the term is rarely used, the illicit circulation of liquor in the U.S. during Prohibition created a one-commodity black market, and the combination of scarcity-induced demand and imperfect policing in postwar Vienna led to outcomes similar to those depicted in gangster movies during the ‘Thirties. Initially, the flow of black traffic in Vienna was improvised and sporadic, face-to-face bargains struck in certain crowded public locations, to which the Viennese police and the Occupying Authority responded by keeping crowds on the move, by making those locations out of bounds to troops, and by introducing scrip in “an attempt to break the chain of selling military supplies on the black market and buying more supplies with the proceeds,” provisions that left intact what a British military publication entitled Austria: Report and Review called an emergent “black market gentry.” The sort of crime syndicate over which Harry...