The Third Man is a very well made, very well cast and very well acted movie.
But that alone is not enough to put it into everybody's top ten movies of all time.
For it also has gravitas, in spades.
It deals, quite seriously, with possibly the ultimate form of evil in our post-Auschwitz world : cold-bloodedly killing innocent little children.
In the movie, character Harry Lime deliberately waters down his already highly profitable black market penicillin ("P" in hospital shorthand) that he is peddling under the table to civilian hospitals in postwar joint powers occupied Vienna.
Even when he knows that watering down the penicillin ensures that babies will die painful deaths from meningitis, when that is actually the easiest of all diseases for penicillin to cure.
That the elusive Harry is so suave and charming, in his few on-camera appearances, only makes the viewers' horror more morally acute.
That 'fungoid growths' could go from the epitome of absolute evil (here reference Hitler,A and Lovecraft,HP) to the epitome of absolute good in only a few short years would certainly make the ghost of Henry Dawson astonished, proud and very happy...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
No comments:
Post a Comment