ArchiveBlogsFilm 2012
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Still Dots #79
Crosscuts
Sep 2012
We catch Harry, master actor that he is, with a particular slackjawed expression as he gazes from the side of the Ferris wheel’s gondola. Holly has just charged Harry with something that must rankle them both at the base of their Catholic upbringing. In response to Harry’s nihilistic monologue on the inhumanity of all of […]
We catch Harry, master actor that he is, with a particular slackjawed…
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Still Dots #78
Crosscuts
Sep 2012
Holly’s look says it all: if he had any doubts before, he now doubtlessly considers his onetime best friend Harry Lime as not only a threat but a despicable human being, an amoral nihilist who has come to embrace the worst tenets of both capitalism and modern political warfare. On Tuesday, Jeremy succinctly recapped Harry’s speech on the Riesenrad, a dialogue sequence rightfully regarded as one…
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Still Dots #77
Crosscuts
Sep 2012
A shadow passes over Harry’s handsome features, both literally and figuratively. The giant Ferris wheel, the Viener Riesenrad, is continuing its orbit and the gondola that he and Holly occupy is continuing its ascent above the no-longer-abandoned park, Vienna’s Prater. As the gondola falls into the shadow of one of the abstracted steel pylons that […]
A shadow passes over Harry’s handsome features…
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Still Dots #76
Crosscuts
Aug 2012
Although Harry Lime has, as Jeremy pointed out on Tuesday, already made several fleeting appearances in The Third Man, today’s still is the first time we see him as a flesh-and-blood human being, awkwardly posed mid-sentence, interacting with Holly Martins in a more-than-spectral manner for the first time. Of course, this is also the first scene in which we hear Orson Welles’ mellifluous speaking…
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Still Dots #75
Crosscuts
Aug 2012
This is our third glimpse of Harry Lime, aside from his shoes and his shadow, and it is certainly a glimpse and no more. (In case you don’t remember, here is his first appearance and his second.) His figure is the one half-hidden behind a pole from the carousel, the same carousel he will disappear […]
This is our third glimpse of Harry Lime, aside from his shoes and his shadow, and it is certainly a…
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Blogs



Still Dots #74
Crosscuts
Aug 2012
Holly has turned up at Baron Kurtz’s apartment, only to find that the shady Baron (slash-violinist at the Casanova Club) is joined by Dr. Winkel, the man whose name Holly could never pronounce. (After all, Holly’s only finally stopped calling Calloway “Callahan”; we shouldn’t expect him to start saying Vink-el any time soon.) Actually, Holly’s not looking for Kurtz or Winkel: he’s calling out Harry Lime…
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Still Dots #73
Crosscuts
Aug 2012
We find Anna, again, in the clutches of the British military’s investigations, though this time she has been pulled in as a potential witness. Calloway begins his interrogation with a characteristically brusque interruption, “Now then, Miss Schmidt, I’m not interested in your forged papers – that’s purely a Russian case. When did you last see Lime?” With this vaguest hint of absolution with regards to…
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Still Dots #72
Crosscuts
Aug 2012
At military headquarters, Anna is being ushered up a desolate staircase by a throng of officers as Holly spots her approaching. Anxiously, he tries to break through their protective entourage in order to divulge what she still does not know: Harry Lime is alive. “I’ve just seen a dead man walking!,” Holly says to her incredulously. “I saw him buried, and now I’ve seen him alive!” The uncanny thus…
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Still Dots #71
Crosscuts
Aug 2012
In 1939, 10 years before the release of The Third Man and six months before the beginning of the war that would shape its setting, papers were being signed that would change American cinema forever. Alfred Hitchcock was coming to Hollywood. At the time, his fame in England was frantic (newspapers were calling him “Alfred the Great”) and his international reputation was growing in leaps in bounds. A…