When I lived and taught in Bulgaria (1995-96), the country had finally abandoned Communism and was venturing into an uncontrolled experiment in capitalism.  The trial got off to a rough start, and the economy collapsed while I was there.  We used to joke that everyday during the first semester, the TV news showed a new bank opening, complete with a blessing from an Orthodox bishop, and everyday during the second semester, the news story was a bank collapsing with the money having disappeared to Luxembourg or Switzerland or Monaco.  I had put $3,000 into one of the biggest banks, Zemedelski Kredit--and all of it went missing.  For days, I'd stand outside the bank (just like in the pictures in our American history texts from the bank failures of the Great Depression), surrounded by a mass of Bulgarians, all shouting angrily, all promised that the money would be available the next day.  It wasn't, of course.  I felt guilty about my demands: while it wasn't pleasant to lose $3,000, I wasn't going to starve.  The Bulgarians around me had lost their entire life savings.  As the currency collapsed, my salary as a full professor at Sofia University, the biggest and most prestigeous in the country, fell to $18 a month--and that was if there was actually money to give out.  Although my Bulgarian friends continued to be as generous as they could be, Sofia was gray, polluted, depressed, and depressing.  (I do want to add that I loved my year in Sofia.  I had a great time and made many friends there.  But it also had its obvious challenges; even before the collapse, Bulgaria was the second poorest country in Europe.  Only Albania was poorer, so, of course, for spring break, three of us--me, a young American, and a young Bulgarian--spent ten fascinating days there.)

In December of 1995, on my way to Paris, I stopped in Vienna to visit Austrian friends there.  I felt like a visitor from another planet.  They constantly found themselves ahead of me because I had stopped to gape at the brightly lit store windows, decorated for Christmas and full of luxurious displays.  I marveled that the streetcars actually had heat and lights.  In Sofia, the buses, streetcars, and trams had all been bought from other countries when they were taken out of service there.  There was never heat, in winter snow often blew in through holes in the roof, and the lights rarely worked.  You had to jump into the street, try to see whether you could read the destination of vehicle on the front, and then jump back out of the way.  There were two things I wanted to do in Vienna: visit the home and museum of Sigmund Freud and ride the ferris wheel featured in the film The Third Man. 

Last night, TCM showed that movie, directed by Carol Reed in 1949 and set in a post-war Vienna that bore little resemblance to the Vienna of my December visit.  The city is slowly recovering from the war; piles of rubble and burnt-out buildings are everywhere.  Vienna is divided into five sectors (American, British, French, and Russian with an international zone at the center) with secrecy and competition the norm among the sectors.  The economy is still based on a black market, riddled with corruption--and that corruption is the heart of the story.  Joseph Cotten plays the naive American, a writer of silly, but popular Western pot-boilers, who arrives in Vienna to meet his old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles), who is being buried as the film begins.  Cotten bumbles his way into the underworld of this society, trying ineptly to make sense of the webs of lies and contradictions that he encounters.  For much of the movie, he tries to convince others that Lime's death was no accident, that he was murdered.  But then, an hour into the film, he discovers that Lime isn't even dead.  In one of the most dramatic and anticipated initial appearances in movies, he sees Harry, alive and smiling, but also running away from him.  He's known that Lime was involved in the black market, but because they were friends, he assumes Lime's involvement was petty and relatively benign.  What he finally learns, however, is that his friend was selling diluted black market penicillin, which left many children dead of meningitis. and those who did survive permanently hospitalized.  And despite Welles's charm and seeming bonhomie, he has not a trace of loyalty--neither to his lover (Alida Valli) nor to Cotten.  In the memorable scene on the ferris wheel, the first time the two men actually can talk, part of the tension arises from Cotten's realization that Welles would have no compunction about throwing him from the compartment.  The script was written by the Catholic novelist Graham Greene, and the amoral Lime is the first time that the innocent Cotten realizes that real evil exists, that a winning smile and assurances of friendship can disguise something much darker, and that amorality may be a euphemism for real immorality.

The Third Man is an iconic film for technical reason as well.  The score is nothing but the famous zither music (if you heard it, you'd recognize it) that plays throughout the film--no Viennese waltzes, no folk dances, just the insistent sound of the zither.  What other film makes its audience wait for an hour before the most famous actor in the movie finally appears?  Welles is nothing but a shadow in a doorway with a cat, which we have learned earlier likes no one but Lime, purring at his feet until a bright light suddenly illuminates his smiling face.  Later in the movie, as Lime flees through the sewers of Vienna, he'll also be seen mainly in shadows until a police spotlight suddenly brings his evil into the light.  Indeed, the whole black and white film constantly plays with shadow and light, an appropriate technique as the truth of evil moves out of the shadows.  That look reminds us of the great silent German films produced at the Ufa studio, as does Reed's constant use of "Dutch angle" shots--shots where the camera is tilted slightly so that both what's being shot and our reaction to it are just slightly unbalanced.  There is also the classic flight of Lime through the sewers, the rat pursued in his natural environment, as the police and his former "friend" close in on him.  When Lime is finally trapped, we see a shot from above ground of his fingers emerging from the manhole cover, wiggling impotently.  And there are the famous scenes at the burial of Lime/Welles--first faked, the second time real--of Alida Valli walking down the tree-lined allée of the cemetery.  The first time, Cotten is in a jeep.  He doesn't yet know her, but watches fascinated by her determined walk (and, of course, her beauty).  The second time, as the movie ends, he exits the jeep to wait for her.  Her approach is long and slow.  She reaches where he stands; her eyes never waver as she walks past him and into her future.  The last shot is of Cotten, lighting a cigarette, his face expressionless, leaving us to wonder just how much he has actually learned from his encounter with a world where he can't play the good sheriff to the rescue who is a fixture of his paper-thin novels.