The Third Man: Fiendish Irony and Orson Welles being too charming to hate

The reason I loved the film The Third Man is undoubtedly the amount of intense irony that occurs everywhere; in the story and dialogue, in the setting, in the music, and especially in the oblique camera angles and strange shots that are so compelling and make the movie so much more than just the lines of the actors. (Not to say that the actors aren't interesting or compelling, Orson Welles is the man!)

Generally, I have thought that it was a good thing that movies try and draw you totally into the story and really make you forget that you are watching a movie. The Third Man, however, really sort of makes a point of distancing viewers from the story in a lot of ways and pulling them out to say, "WTF? Thats really weird...Why are they doing that?"
The camera angles, for example, are just so off and angular that its really pretty much impossible to miss. I think that the odd camera work helps and adds to the story because it adds to the chaotic sense of confusion and isolation in the characters like Holly. We understand his lack of knowledge of the city, his not being able to understand what is being said half the time, and so these odd angles help to add to this weird confusing atmosphere that surrounds this character. The irony here, of course, is that generally to get a better and more in depth view of a character, you would naturally want a more straight and clear view of that characters experiences. In this however, Holly's experiences are confused and confusing, so a confusing angle is an ingenious way to sort of simultaneously deepen the audiences view of the characters and distance them from the film in odd way.

The setting that we enter would be one that I would expect to be well run and a pinnacle of the victors of World War II. Ironically, the reality is a ruined, chaotic world where terrible people like Harry Lime manipulate everything and exploit the weakened people of Europe and there isnt much the police can do to make justice a reality. Winning the war did not lead to a golden age(ish) for Europe like it did in America. The entire continent was destroyed. I hadnt really grasped this fact entirely and so I really found this chaotic setting of the beautiful city of Vienna to be an interesting eye opener

In the article "The Revenant of Vienna," they talk alot about Dracula and entering his "shadow world," which I found really interesting in relation to this movie in alot of ways. First of all, it plays directly into one of the major themes of the visual aspect of the film which is shadows and contrasts. The shadows are SOOOO important for making this gothic and dark feeling in alot of the scenes. Shadows even play a noticeable role in the plot of the film, with the shadowy figure of Harry Lime finally being revealed for example when Holly is shouting for the spy to come out of the shadows, or the huge shadows that he and other characters cast on the city and sewer walls of Vienna. Again, this is ironic because usually in movies, the things we want to pay attention to are the things where light falls, where we can see all the details. In this, emphasis is placed on the lack of light, on the lack of knowledge of what is really there, and on the confusion from not having the truth.

The article also talks about how Holly's arrival into the city of Vienna is alot like his arrival into this shadow realm, which I found interesting because before if you had asked me what the shadow world of the movie was I would say the Soviet section of the city. After all, this is where Harry Lime resides in the movie, its the place they are trying to keep Anna from (since she'll likely be imprisoned or killed), and I always thought that the Soviets are just generally supposed to be the bad guys in movies like this. It is not, however, just the Soviet sector that Lime lurks in and has power, and the "good guys" that arent on the Russian side of town arent really all that good in the end. So the better conclusion in my opinion is that the entire city is like a chaotic shadow realm.