Watching THE THIRD MAN as a small child

I actually think I was thirteen going on fourteen when I first saw THE THIRD MAN, as part of Halifax CJCH-TV's nightly series of movies in the early evening.

I had read plenty of media account of the horrors of the Holocaust by then but hadn't really see anything cinematic about it, nothing to hit me really hard emotionally.

But THE THIRD MAN, centred on the morality of mis-used penicillin, did indeed hit me really hard.

No wonder, for it was a film that remains (65 years later) on many critics' lists of the top ten movies of all time.


As a small child, I had always found the events of WWII and the ten years thereafter very exciting and had always regretted never been being there mentally at firsthand (I was born in late 1951).

And in particular, I became an aware young person too late in the antibiotics revolution to be able to imagine the intense impact of this first miracle medicine upon human thought.

But the events in this film set in postwar Vienna changed all that : I could now feel, in my bones, for the first time how it was for people of that period.

How, for moviegoers back then, the ultimate good must be in providing penicillin to dying little ones and so the ultimate evil was not yet Auschwitz but rather those who would deny lifesaving penicillin to dying little ones.

I think the emotional wallop of that old B&W movie set my current penicillin project in motion --- only this time substituting Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey, Newton Richards and Winston Churchill for Harry Lime in the denying penicillin to dying children department ....

Harry Lime : the man who watered the babies' "P"

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...

Why was Marie Barker's actual death sentence praised while Harry Lime's fictional murders so condemned : a story of two Teddy Bears ...

The 1943 real life Allied decision to deny penicillin to Marie Barker (the only medicine that could save the life of this young teenager and SBE patient) on the (unstated) grounds that her disease was 'not a military priority', has generally been praised by historians of science - then and now.

It was also acquiesced in - at the very least - by most lay people back then.

Even when that public saw newspaper photos of still just a teenager Marie breaking into a smile of delight at the sight of one of her 'stuffies' (a teddy bear) that her Canadian-born mother Hermance had brought to her bedside.

By contrast the needless, painful but fictional deaths caused by Harry Lime denying penicillin to children in 1949 Vienna only six years later has been strongly condemned by most of those same academics and by the public generally.

Okay ---- perhaps the professors did not condemn it in actual peer reviewed articles, but almost certainly, like the public, they did so in casual water cooler talk and during post-movie-watching 'pillow talk' between spouses.

I can claim this with some certainty because it is known that countless audience members discussing the moral issues raised by Harry Lime's unspeakable actions around helpless children and penicillin was what helped lift THE THIRD MAN from being just another run of the mill B&W 'quota flick' to among the top films of all time.

How the casual upending of a child's teddy bear helped change us for good

In just six short years, we went from praising the decision to cold bloodedly and publicly kill Marie Barker & her teddy bear by baneful neglect ------- to blanching at the mere fleeting sight of a nurse silently putting the teddy bear of of one of Harry Lime's victims upside down on a waste basin.

I hold that to be a hugely momentous moral upending, as dramatic in its own way as was the totally unexpected upending of the best in civilized technology by primitive penicillin...

WWII's Opium Wars : Britain's efforts to weaponize life-saving penicillin

The shabby ways in which the Churchill Conservatives, coupled loosely with Republican friends in the American OSRD, conspired to weaponize life-saving wartime penicillin should not surprise anyone with any historical knowledge.

Britain was a past-master at using life-strangling blockades of someone else's civilian population to substitute for the possible combat deaths of the officer sons of the British elite.

Napoleon had been defeated by just such a blockade policy and the Opium Wars against China had shown just how effective covert drug warfare can be in de-stabilizing a nation's populace.

(A lesson hardly lost on the OSRD's successors in the CIA et al.)

But Churchill and Britain were playing with fire when they attempted to severely limit the production of penicillin and restrict its use to only those frontline Allied sick combatants deemed recoverable for further combat.

Because in the 1940s we did not have the arsenal of about 100 viable antibiotics that we have today.

We had only a half dozen members of the Sulfa drug family and they were all rapidly failing --- due to overuse bringing on rapid bacterial resistance.

Wars bring on sudden pandemics - like WWI's horrific Spanish Flu.

One wonders what would the world response had been to Sir Winston Churchill (the Harry Lime of British politics) if tens of millions of people had needlessly died, before penicillin production was brought up to speed ?

The world was very lucky indeed that Henry Dawson was not so callous as Churchill and the Allied scientific establishment on the turning a precious lifesaver into a weapon of war...

Penicillin : both its mold and its morals seem to hang out in basements and sewers

Rollo Martins the Canadian naif to Harry Lime's evil...

When I started looking into wartime penicillin, back in late 2004, I quickly felt like that other Canadian , Rollo Martins, learning far more about the immoral underbelly of  the official - and sunny - penicillin story than either of us wanted to know.


About all I originally knew about wartime penicillin was from recalling a CBC TV production (originally from Britain ?) that involved a policeman dying of a cut from a rose bush and a doctor named Fleming .

(I had seen it in the late 1950s, back when I was about eight years old.)

That and the fact that the peacetime penicillin clan was a firm family friend - having saved my family many times from serious illness.

I had no idea of penicillin's Canadian connection - like virtually everyone I wasn't aware there even was one.

I gradually and dimly recalled penicillin coming up in a great British film called The Third Man.

I looked at a video of it again and then, on a visit to my brother in Britain, read a great book on how the film and novella came to be.

From both video and the book about the film and novella, I got a strong sense of the extraordinary moral over (and under) tones that penicillin has and that the other three hundred or so existing commercial antibiotics completely lack.

I am only guessing why The Third Man is rated , not near the top of the all time best British films (a dead cert that), but at the very toppermost of the very top : but for me it is the penicillin sub-text.

Britain, unlike Japan and Germany, had really and truly lost the war and so its wartime scientific discoveries like penicillin, jets and radar were seen as absolutely essential to retaining the British sense of collective self esteem.

And so for Harry Lime to muddy penicillin's (and Britain's) good name by , in effect, using it to murder helpless kids , was for them a worse crime against humanity than anything short of Auschwitz.

Sewers as a metaphor for both good - and evil 

Dark ,cool ,dank, concrete sewers and basements is where penicillin the green and gold agent of life actually originally came from - but it was also the true home of that agent of death, Harry Lime .

This was a masterstroke from Greene and Reed ,the one Ying and Yang symbol that puts this film over the top.....

HARRY LIME : from war hero to infamous cinematic villain

Just one of HARRY LIME's "dots"

(See note below added, Dec 4 2012)

It is easy to imagine our Harry (Lime) in July 1943, just back from Hamburg as an Allied bomber pilot dropping fire bombs on Axis children, mere "dots", thousands of feet below him : a war hero, in other words.

Just as easy as imagining our Harry in 1949 Vienna, still a member of an Allied nation and still killing Axis children, only this time with watered-down penicillin.

But something has clearly changed : because now he is regarded as a a villain, in fact one of cinema's all time worst villains.


The difference, I argue, is all down to the fact that Dr Martin Henry Dawson's foolish 1940 war aim had , by 1949, become our war aim too.

In September 1940, Dawson felt that the best way for 'the coalition of the willing few' to win over the hearts and minds of the neutral vast majority of the world's nations into joining in to defeat the Nazis ,was by treating the 'least of these' , those 'useless feeders' the Nazis were so busily killing off in Aktion T4 , with all dignity and worthiness we would want for ourselves.

The flux of Dawson's "parable of action" was to be his own "imperfect but good enough" penicillin.

But instead penicillin had started off,  in the American version of WWII  at least, as something to be heavily censored and something (once leisurely polished by the medical world to a state of 110% perfection) to be reserved only for the blue-eyed and blond A1s of the armed forces.

Used as a "weapon of war" as the NAS (America's science elite) described it.

So penicillin was to be reserved for the young men overseas who had cheated on their girlfriends back home and got a dose of the non-fatal clap ( which had a variety of cures - some taking much longer than others).

Many men in the American combat arms, because of that nation's cruel policy of non-rotation of front line units, had deliberately contracted the clap while on leave, hoping to avoid the meat-grinder of un-ending combat service by a month or two of 'taking the cure'.

And who can blame them ?

Blame instead those rear echelon males who advocated penicillin for combat clap cases:

'Better they get scarce penicillin and hence a quick cure and quickly back into the deathtrap of the front lines than my number get called up  and I end up there,'

was the self-centred attitude of the non-combat majority of Allied males.

Meanwhile, back home, the girlfriends of the boys overseas, faithful onto death, were themselves dying of disease like SBE that were invariably fatal.

And there was only one possible cure : penicillin.

Dawson wanted the government, right from the beginning, to make  his 'good-enough' penicillin a national priority, so there was no false dichotomy between saving civilians versus saving soldiers.

He felt the penicillin scarcity was artificial ---- and deliberate , a pushback at ideas of Social Medicine (the idea that all, poor or rich, had an absolute right of access to life-saving treatment).

The whine of 21st century Republican complaints against Obama medicare,  in old 1940s bottles.

Because SBE like its cause, Rheumatic Fever, was both a progressive re-occurring disease and a disease of the poor, few in the medical elite saw much economic return in saving the SBE's lives.

The disease would only come back and curing it again would consume yet more resources, while even the 'healthy' SBEs, because of their weak heart valves, were often too weak to do hard physical work ---- and too ill-educated to be worth much when they did work.

Best deny them penicillin ( by claiming the disease could not be cured) and let them die.

But Dawson said any nation, in the midst of an all-out Total War,  seen as willing to save even 'useless feeder' SBEs (the 4Fs of the 4Fs) sent a powerful message to all the rest of the world.

It reassured them that all of humanity - even the weakest and the most 'useless'  - would be treated fairly and kindly, under an Allied world.

In late 1943, the Allies started to slowly come around to Dawson's idea as they stopped censoring penicillin stories and started instead to turn it into an item of radio and leaflet propaganda , a symbol of better things to come for all, if only all the world joined the Allies and defeated the Nazis.

To make this promise tangible, they started sending still-scarce penicillin, in widely publicized flights, to dying children in neutral nations, to prove they meant what they claimed.

Monstrances of Hope : Monstrances of Slime

Penicillin, the foul byproduct of basement slime had been converted into the symbol of Goodness, those tiny vials of life-giving yellow held aloft like monstrances of hope.

For Harry then to seize and pervert this heavenly symbol of life for heartless profit, while children - even children of the hated Axis - died horrible deaths, was  now regarded as unspeakably evil - seen almost literally as the work of The Devil himself....

Dec 4th 2012 : I have just read Philip Kerr's essay "Seeing Greene" , partly of the print booklet in the Criterion Collection re-issue of The Third Man on DVD, which makes pretty much the same points as I have about Harry Lime's post war behavior to Axis kids and bomber pilots behavior towards them, from 10,000 feet up, during the war.....

By 1945, Martin Henry Dawson's 1940 war aim had become OUR war aim too

Baby, dank Harry Lime, werden nicht neeeding Teddy

In September 1940 , at the height of the Battle of Britain, war hero Martin Henry Dawson decided against rejoining the Canadian Army to help fight Hitler.

He would fight Hitler instead by saving the lives of the very people that Hitler (and a lot of Dawson's medical colleagues) judged to be "lives unworthy of life" --- particularly in wartime.

In five short weeks, he grew and then injected penicillin into two working class youths, a Negro and a Jew , both dying of invariably fatal SBE.

 In many eyes, they were judged to be the 4Fs of the 4Fs, and definitely not a priority for life-saving during a Total War.

But Dawson instinctively felt that this was something that would definitely separate the Allies from the Axis , proving that the Allies believed in saving all lives - in particular even the smallest and the weakest, "the least of these", as it were.

The Allied government-scientific-military-commercial establishment disagreed, saving penicillin only for the 1As of the 1As, the frontline combat soldiers away from the killing zone due to a non-fatal dose of the clap they had picked up.

They banned the use of penicillin to save SBEs , sentencing them to a certain death.

Dawson, himself dying from a terminal disease, defied the authorities and stole some government-issued penicillin to give to the SBEs , later getting secret supplies from a sympathetic CEO at a Big Pharma corporation.

His misdeeds inspired others, the story broke, Doctor Mom sided with Dawson's ideas and the males in the establishment reluctantly fell in line.

But very soon they saw the virtue in Dawson's ideas, and warplanes were soon flying about, dropping not bombs but penicillin for dying children in both Allied countries and in Neutral nations.

Penicillin-the-lifesaver-of-all-civilian-lives had become a very public weapon in the battle to win the hearts and minds of the world for the Allied cause.

So much so, in fact, that by 1949 erstwhile 'citizen of an Allied nation' Harry Lime was judged one of fiction's all time villains mostly because he had dared to water down the penicillin intended for dying children.  Dying Axis children.

It is this viewpoint, only 4 years after the war, that I thinks allows us to claim "The Third Man" as one of the first postmodern films.

Dawson was four years dead by that point, but I think he would have be proud to think how far his war aims had become our war aims.....

Denier, denier : heartland on fire : Romney's heartland burns while Greenland threatens to , well , become a GREEN land

This week it was announced that Greenland's icecape is melting like the bejesus.

That continent-sized island may soon be green in appearance, as well as in name.

The amount of water sitting on top of it , if it leaps into the water and melts will do two things very quickly : raise ocean water levels worldwide and leave a huge hunk of land that now absorbs sunlight rather than reflect it.

This land warming will couple to the atmosphere instantly and will greatly strengthen our weather's energy reserves --- our deadly weather bombs will move from the A-bomb to the H-bomb variety.

I may soon have to move inland and upcountry quicker than I had expected.

Sea levels don't need to rise much higher before where I live (coastal Nova Scotia) will only houses lobsters and clams, rather than earthlings and SkyGods.

I don't know what The SkyGods Of The Universe, perched in their eeries, high up in the glass and concrete towers of Wall Street and Threadneedle Street, are making of all this.

That is assuming that these latter-day Harry Limes even care what is happening to the "dots" (earthlings), way down at sea level aka ground zero.

I am sure that their astro-turfing think tankers don't care.

I gather most deniers  - at least in America and probably in Australia as well - don't live by the coast but in the high interior.

Republicans and Australia's Libertarian party both speak of the outback as their heartland for voters.

So today Libertarians and Republicans will continue to deny that the world is getting hotter, from among the hottest hellholes on earth - while watching their crops fry......

This century's IDEOLOGICAL DIVIDE : the 'denier scientists' versus the 'commensalist scientists'

Michael Marshall

I'd hate to be among all those young academic social scientists who have invested all their professional lives in studying yesteryear's battle between capitalism and socialism.

Granted, there is still lots of life left in that subject - if you are a historian or a archaeologist , studying ancient artifacts.

But the social scientists are definitely not  that - they like to be as contemporary as tomorrow's headlines.

 And socialism versus capitalism it is so yesterday.

Denier scientists versus Alarmist scientists ( aka  Commensalist scientists) is what heats up the blogosphere today -- and it is their battle that provides the life-sustaining bile that feeds the "Oldstream Media" and its columnists.

Denier scientists like to imagine themselves in white lab coats, floating about 'up there' , like quasi archangels in some sort of theological Space, above and outside our physical Universe.

(But angels without archangel-like white wings - because they deny God  - as well denying any other impediment that might cramp their style.)

Spread out below them and beyond them , like some vast petri dish, is Life - filled with 'dots'  as HARRY LIME so lovelessly described all of us, in THE THIRD MAN.

'Harry Limes in a lab coat', coolly, logically, rationally, objectively, disinterestedly, the Denier scientists take measurements and make corrective adjustments --- but somehow these events never grievously damage the petri dish and its contents.

Archangels at the Right Hand of a God that in their minds at least,  Does Not Exist .

Masters of the Universe,Sky Gods, Sun Gods, Phaeton-Men .

Fundamentally, they believe that Man could survive and indeed soar to new heights, on a planet devoid of competition from all other life - even on a planet devoid of all the materials created by life.

"Man's Mind (and Minerals) Is Enough" is the banner they march under.

But like Phaeton himself, they are trying to ride a machine they can not control and it is alternatively burning up or freezing up parts of our world.

The commensalists are down-to-earth scientists, literally and figuratively earthlings.

What on earth have they been doing, mucking about down in the dirt ?

Well, just for starters, they have discovered that most of the minerals that we can get at , in or just below the Earth's surface, were created via biological activity.

Yep, I will repeat that - most compounds and minerals came from life and either won't exist or would exist in tiny amounts without Life on Earth.

We humans have created a few unique minerals and a lot more unique compounds , but in relatively small amounts - we simply haven't been here long enough , or in large enough numbers, to do much.

We get very little in the way of totally new amounts of elements from outer space - at least over human-oriented time periods.

Nor do volcanoes really bring up new matter.

Instead almost all of the important elements are recycled back and forth endlessly - up into the sky and back into the land and water.

 Some goes on down, way down, down into the ocean bottom and then into the Earth's sub surface interior and eventually back up via volcanoes.

They do not recycle as pure elements but as bits of various compounds - and solar radiation and geological processes unite with biological activity to ceaselessly break up those compounds to make new ones, and so on and on forever.

Think of these recycling efforts as vast wheels.

But Commensality Science begs us not to think of them as vast independent wheels as the Deniers would claim.

Instead they say think of them as a couple dozen big wheels that all constantly bumping up against each other, throwing each other off kilter - usually mildly, within tolerable limits for continuing life, but sometimes - and unexpectedly - in dramatic horrific fashion.

Denier scientists are pusher scientists - they know humanity is addicted on certainty  (and they are the most addicted of all of us - that is why they became denier scientists ) and they peddle quasi-certitudes.

They are  NOT  lying when they say they think we shouldn't do anything  about our environmental crisis until we are 100% sure of the facts, all of the facts.

Because the truly scary thing about these scientists is not that they are liars (I don't believe they are) but theat they truly believe that Reality is knowable to the point of 100% certainty.

In light of 100 years of sound basic science that says it is not, that is Bad Science, Bad Faith Science.

I agree they have a problem, but I just don't think remaining as practicing (practicing on us) scientists is the best solution to that problem...