Directed by: Carol Reed
Starring: Joseph Cotten | Orson Welles | Alida Valli
Rating: FIVE out of FIVE zithers
“A person doesn’t change just because you find out more.”
Vienna’s a busted-up corpse of a city, stitched together by Allied red tape and bad intentions. The Brits have a corner. The Yanks have a corner. The Russians are sulking in theirs. Even the French got a slice, somehow. It’s a city carved into zones like a rotting pie, each piece crawling with uniforms, sidearms, and the quiet hum of betrayal.
Everyone’s spying on everyone. The waiters. The milkmen. The little old ladies peering through lace curtains. It’s not paranoia. It’s protocol. You light a cigarette and someone’s already filed a report about it. You ask directions and wind up on a list.
It’s noir with bomb craters, barbed wire, and a curfew that doesn’t keep anyone safe. Morality? That got shot, looted, and tossed into the Danube with the rest of the bodies. Nothing’s clean here. Not the streets, not the deals, not your conscience.
Even the cat’s got secrets. Little bastard shows up purring in one scene and sells out Harry Lime like it’s just another Tuesday.
Harry Lime. A ghost story locals whisper after too much schnapps. A man. A myth. A charming little capitalist horror show. You hear his name before you ever see him, and by the time he shows up, it’s like spotting Bigfoot in a tailored suit. Just who is he?
He’s your old friend, your drinking buddy, your pen pal, until you realize he’s been slinging watered-down penicillin to children’s hospitals. Suddenly the grin doesn’t land the same.
They build him up like he’s untouchable. The kind of man who could talk a nun into a poker game. But there’s rot under the charm, and a price tag on every one of his morals. He’s not just a villain, he’s a mirror. You look at him and wonder how many bad decisions away you are from doing the same thing. Maybe two. Maybe one. Maybe none.
Orson Welles didn’t just play Harry Lime. He resurrected him. Breathed life into a corpse of a man who, by all accounts, was already dead. When he finally steps out of the shadows, half smirk, half specter, it’s not an entrance, it’s a seance.
Welles makes Lime feel bigger than the film that contains him. You don’t remember the first half of the movie because you’re too busy waiting for him. He’s been talked up. Mephistopheles selling snake oil in a black market maze. And when he appears, he’s exactly what they promised and somehow worse.
He doesn’t chew the scenery. He seduces it. One minute he’s delivering that cuckoo clock monologue, the next he’s running through the sewers like a rat who knows the game’s up.
Orson Welles didn’t just play Harry Lime. He haunted him. And now Harry haunts us.
By all accounts, he only gets about ten minutes of screen time. But it’s enough. More than enough. Any more, and let’s be honest, well, you can be honest. I’m not. I lie for sport. But even I’ll admit, stretch it out and you risk dulling the blade. Ten minutes. That’s the magic trick. It only takes a little to go a long way.
