The Third Man
The Japanese public broadcast station NHK televised these days old movies through its satellite channel.
Last night, they telecast “In the Heat of the Night” featuring Sidney Poitier as a young and tough African American police detective, which is a work of 1967, a year precedent to the tragedy of Martin Luther King, Jr.
The other day, “The Third Man.”
Both the movies were highly appreciated when they were first released in Japan decades ago. Here my concern is on The Third Man.
Even in this day of computer graphics, the camera work and image structure of The Third Man never lose its color.
It is an American version of the original English story.
After the World War II, the English wanted romance in war-torn Vienna, but Americans wanted something different for a story in remote Vienna where their boys were stationed while leaving their girlfriends home. And, uncannily the Cold War was approaching.
Therefore, the last scene of The Third Man, meaning an unidentified and unreported principal, had been rewritten or remade for different versions of the film.
To satisfy American girls, US boys should have a broken heart in Europe. This pattern was also applied to “Roman Holiday” featuring Audrey Hepburn, in my opinion.
So, in the last scene on a winter cemetery path, Anne, a Czechoslovak, passed as if a stranger by Holly, an American paperback writer, who had been invited to Vienna to eventually and haplessly kill his old friend Harry, a kind of the independent mafia who had somehow fallen in love with Anne.
Vienna is a place where Adolf Hitler had spent five years as a poor young soul or nothing. Later he wrote that he got a sickening feeling when he recalled Vienna, a Babylon city of many races.
After the completion of War on or Operation in Iraq, will they be able to create a movie presenting a romance or a doom in Baghdad between an American man and an Arab woman or vice versa?
As the scale of a crime the third-man type of men would be engaged in is nowadays mega-multiplied, extraordinary efforts will be needed for peace after wars in Middle East even on screen.
Anyway, it will be a big hit in Japan again.
“SO THAT HE WILL BE ASHAMED"