The Third Man (1949)

Pulp western writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) comes to a post-war Vienna that’s all Dutch angles, high shadows and people of dubious trustworthiness. His childhood friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) has lured him there with a vague job offer, and where Harry calls, Holly goes, vagueness or not. Alas, when Holly actually arrives, his friend is not in a fit state for providing a job, for he is about to be buried. Apparently, Harry Lime died in an automobile accident, not the kind of death you’d expect for a larger than life personage like him.

Apart from Holly, Harry Lime leaves behind an actress lover with a secret (Alida Valli) and British and Russian military policemen so happy about his death, they’re not going to actually investigate it. As Holly soon learns, his friend was apparently involved in large scale black market operations.

Holly really can’t believe that of his roguish but not evil childhood buddy and sets out to find a bit more about the Harry Lime situation than the police is ready to tell him. While Holly is doing that, he stumbles upon the fact that a mysterious third man appears to have been part of the accident that killed Harry. His friend’s death might very well have been murder. Together with Harry’s lover Anna Schmidt, Holly goes further and further done a proper rabbit hole of an investigation, while of course falling for the lady.

Carol Reed’s The Third Man is an indelible classic, situated somewhere where noir and Hitchcockian thriller meet. I’d argue that its portrayal of individuals trapped in the aftermath of a political conflagration, in the hand of secretive powers they can’t fully comprehend, is an important milestone on the road to the kind of pessimism the 70s conspiracy thriller would deal in. This version of Vienna is the incubation point of many things that would go wrong and grow worse in the coming two decades, as well as the way the movies would look at them.

Stylistically, I find The Third Man particularly fascinating as an example on how to use real locations (among some choice sets) and make them look unreal and threatening, how to see and shoot them as places where the shadows outside do indeed mirror the shadows inside the hearts of the characters. The abundance of Dutch angles portray an off-kilter world, the huge, often more than simply thick, shadows are bringing to the surface the undercurrents of reality in ways only a movie can.

As a German, I’m always surprised by the film’s use of actual Austrian actors for the minor roles, who, unlike what you encounter in most Hollywood films, speak actual idiomatic German, and whose dialogue feels utterly probable for the time and place. This adds a further layer of reality only accessibly to an audience who understands what these actors are saying.

There’s a very specific quality to The Third Man that suggests a film where everything comes together just right: the obvious visual artistry, the interest in getting details right, the interplay between heightened style and naturalism, the acting (Welles leaving a deep impression of a very complex character in only a couple of scenes, Cotton and Valli probably giving the performances of their lives without looking as if they are trying), the curious decisions that turn out to be just right (that zither score is such a strange idea, when you think about it). At the same time, it is one of those highly constructed films that never feels as if it were trying all that hard – it just is.

F for Fake (1973)

Hired to take over/make use of the bare bones of a documentary made by François Reichenbach about art forger and general high living faker Elmyr de Hory and his biographer and semi-professional liar Clifford Irving, Orson Welles starts having a bit of fun, turning the material into a meditation on art and reality, the nature of forgery, the flim-flam elements of his own particular talents, and takes an opportunity to show off his late life partner Oja Kodar  – in a very unreconstructed kind of way you really wouldn’t encounter anymore these days, very much for better and for worse.

Also involved are thoughtful moments of Orson – in his role as one of the great and wonderful hams of the screen - hamming it up considerably when the opportunity for a monologue arises (or whenever he simply fancies doing one), some moments of “high art” theatre, and a dirty story about great painter made particularly funny via a combination of “look how hot my girlfriend is!” and Michel Legrand’s score going full softcore soundtrack on us.

All of this is very Orson Welles in many aspects. Welles treats the project as yet another opportunity to show off his – considerable – intelligence and his – hardly in need of an adjective - talents – real and imagined. On paper, this should be a rather unpleasant watch – Orson holding forth to his friends with a glass of wine or three, Orson showing magic tricks, Orson talking up his girlfriend, Orson wearing his favourite hat, and so on, and so forth. In practice, like most of the man’s weirder projects, there’s a genuine charm to film and man. Sure, he’s full of himself, but he also appears to approach his audience as people who are on his own level (up in the stratosphere, at least), whom he invites to think about a couple of things, to have various very diverse kinds of fun with him, to listen to interesting people tell even more interesting lies and truths, and to present us with a last run-through of what Orson Welles was all about.

Only the very disagreeable would disagree with this approach, and only the much too serious would not be caught up in Welles’s charm. I for one don’t want to be any of these things, at least this evening.

House of Cards (1968)

These last few years, American Reno Davis (George Peppard) has made his living as a middling boxer on the European circuit. He’s coming to the end of his rope here, though. So it’s an ironically nice twist of fate when a little boy (Barnaby Shaw) we will soon enough learn to be called Paul de Villemont nearly shoots Davis by accident. Well, perhaps the nearly dying bit’s not that nice, but Paul’s mother likes the cut of Davis’s jib, and certainly his American manliness, and decides he’s just the kind of man who should be her son’s new tutor, and rock of sanity against the family of her late husband.

Turns out the family is the core of an international fascist conspiracy out to create a new world order of particular shittiness; whereas Davis is pretty good at punching Nazis.

John Guillermin’s House of Cards never gets quite as crazy as the spy movies his Italian colleagues made in the wake of James Bond Mania, and its hipness and fashion sense is more on the down to Earth side of the late 60s, so I wouldn’t exactly compare this to a Eurospy movie, though the film certainly is part of the family. Nominally, this is a US production, but directed by a Brit and shot in France and Italy with a cast mostly consisting of Europeans, the vibe isn’t exactly Hollywood.

After a somewhat slow start, the film becomes increasingly fun. Guillermin first makes an enjoyable time out of Peppard acting like the proverbial hammer in search of a nail in any situation where subtlety would be called for, pretending horrible male chauvinist nonsense is charm in so drastic a manner I couldn’t help but see the film making fun of it when nobody’s looking, only to then turn up the paranoia. Why, for twenty minutes or so, this even seems to prefigure the paranoia of 70s conspiracy thrillers, to surprisingly gripping effect. After which, because this certainly isn’t a film made to bore anyone by staying too constant in tone and mood, our hero finds himself captured and encounters a parade of dysfunctional fascists, whose portrayal is about as sardonic as possible. The bad guy actors do milk their scenery chewing opportunities with excellence, so Davis eventually getting the better of them is very satisfying indeed, particularly since Peppard manages to make his somewhat thuggish and pretty misogynistic character likeable beyond the “everybody is better than a Nazi” rule. I’m still not quite sure how he does it, but it certainly works.

The only one looking a bit bored on screen is Orson Welles, who clearly only pops in for a couple of scenes to collect a pay check for alimonies or doomed film projects, but at least he’s trying to convince George Peppard’s little tutee to gun our hero down for real this time, while being all hypnotic and malevolently low-angled.

House of Cards’ production values are higher than you’d get from the more cardboard oriented Italian Eurospy arm, so Guillermin has quite a few opportunities to impress the audience with very pretty shots of France and Italy. Particularly the castle our hero finds himself trapped in for quite a stretch looks rather impressive. But as an old veteran of these things, I’m already delighted when doors at least look as if they were made of wood, and the same shot of a car isn’t repeated ad nauseam throughout a chase, so sane viewers’ mileage may vary.

Speaking of chases, while this wasn’t made with the set piece loving heart of even the early Bond movies, the action sequences generally flow very well and have a nice sense of physicality to them, even though all Nazi goons do have glass chins. The last point only adds to the fun, of course, for what is more entertaining than seeing a Nazi getting punched by George Peppard in action hero mode?

In short: The Witching (1972)

aka Necromancy

We who know Bert I. Gordon mostly adore or spurn him as the king of awkward giant monster movies. However, despite a clear preference for very large or very small things, Gordon was a true exploitation director, hopping on any trend that came his way if it suggested a possibility for turning a fast buck.

In 1972, that meant making an occult horror movie about Pamela Franklin getting unwillingly drawn into the influence sphere of an evil satanist cult (or witch cult, the film doesn't differentiate) led by Orson Welles(!) in his bloated and bored phase because Orson needs her secret witch super powers to reanimate his dead little son. Which is one of the better motives for what's going on than these films often prefer. Too bad neither Welles nor Gordon are doing much with that aspect of the movie.

Instead, The Witching is a rollercoaster ride between long, plainly boring scenes of actors who could act but won't mumbling or shouting through slightly loopy versions of early 70s occultism horror clichés and awkward yet strangely effective scenes of delightfully illogical trance states. I did rather expect the first part of the ride from Gordon, his giant monster movies do after all have a tendency to go about things in an awkward and slightly ramshackle manner that has always reminded me of how a middle-aged used car salesman would interpret the idea of giant monsters.

The film's dream-like parts on the other hand did hit me as a surprise. Sure, the adjective of "awkward" still applies to Gordon's direction here, but here, the awkwardness rubs against moments of ambitious camera work and visual ideas that remind me of nothing so much as of Italian gothic horror and giallos. That impression of encountering a bit of pleasant European loopiness where I least expected it, is - at least in the version I watched, which I think, is based on a 1983 version of the film that adds a bit of nudity and surely subtracts other things - still more enhanced by a synth soundtrack very much in the spirit of Goblin (but not as good, not surprisingly).

Consequently, The Witching is at its strongest (or at least at its most charming) when it gives up on real world logic altogether and becomes a free-floating entity made out of strange emotional peaks, sleaze, vague notions of Satanism, Pamela Franklin widening her eyes and a side-ways approach to narrative that emphasises counter-intuitive scenes while treating what should be actual dramatic climaxes with off-handed disinterest. If you're like me, and this sort of thing is exactly what you hope for in your occult 70s horror, the devil's rain will fall on you gently here, particularly in a final half hour that is as glorious an appropriation of the dream state as you'll find in movies.

I never would have thought Bert I. Gordon had it in him.

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