Adventures in post-war Europe: The Third Man & Roman Holiday

The last time I watched The Third Man, it was in a basement cinema in Vienna. When it finished I walked out into the actual streets, and some part of me was half-looking for the film I'd just seen; the rubble, the wet cobbles, the shadowed doorways where the black-marketeers did their trade.

Of course there was nothing. The Vienna on the screen was seventy years gone, rebuilt and rebuilt again into a perfectly charming European capital with decent coffee and no visible bullet holes. I knew that. I went looking anyway.

That's the small spell these old movies cast: they make you believe, for a couple of hours, that the city on the screen is still out there to be found. The Third Man (1949) was shot in the real, ruined, occupied city while it was still real and ruined and occupied.

Which is what makes it such a striking thing to pair with Roman Holiday (1953), shot a few years later and a few hundred miles south, in a Rome that the Second World War had treated very differently.

Two cities, two cameras pointed at post-war Europe, two directors who went and filmed in the actual streets. The results were two completely different stories about what that continent looked like as it climbed back to its feet. One told in shadow. One in light.

A warning before we start: here be spoilers. Both films turn on endings worth protecting, and this piece gives them away. If you haven't seen them, go watch them first and then come back.

Vienna, in shadow

The Third Man tells you what kind of city you're in before a single character is introduced.

Director Carol Reed narrates the opening himself — brisk, almost cheerful — laying out a Vienna sliced into four occupied sectors, the Allied powers each holding a piece. In the gaps between them is a thriving trade in everything that shouldn't be for sale.

Reed shot for six weeks in the actual rubble of Vienna in 1948 — one of the first British films to commit so heavily to real locations — with the rest finished back home: many interiors, stretches of the sewer chase, and even the close-ups of that famous doorway were reconstructed at Shepperton Studios in London.

The real city and the studio simulacra are stitched together so well you can't see the join. He and cinematographer Robert Krasker shot all of it as a nightmare of tilted angles and hard shadow, every cobblestone slick and every archway looming. The famous Anton Karas zither score should by rights be too jaunty for the material, and instead it's the perfect counterpoint, a tune that grins while terrible things happen just out of frame.

And the creature who belongs to this city is Harry Lime. His entrance is one of cinema's great reveals: a doorway in shadow, a hungry cat, then a sudden shaft of light. Orson Welles plays Lime as charming, sly, amused, and utterly without conscience; he's been selling diluted penicillin to a children's hospital, and he can't see why anyone would make a fuss.

Later, lounging outside a Ferris wheel, Lime delivers his defence of himself; the one about the Borgias and the Renaissance versus five hundred years of Swiss peace and the cuckoo clock. It's a towering speech that's also complete nonsense (the cuckoo clock is German, from the Black Forest, and the history is mangled), reportedly improvised by Welles on the day.

But the nonsense is the point. Lime is a man who can make a beautiful, confident case for anything, including his own monstrousness, and a city of cracks and corruption is exactly where a man like that thrives.

Rome, in light

Roman Holiday steps out of the shadows and into the sun, and the change is total. Where Reed's Vienna is all enclosure and threat, Director William Wyler's Rome is vibrant — crowds, traffic, scooters, outdoor cafés, the sheer bustling momentum of a city getting on with living.

Wyler had to fight to shoot in Rome at all. The studio wanted him on the backlot, and he refused, insisting the city itself had to be in the picture. He won, though the interiors (the apartment, the spiral staircase, much of the embassy) were still built at Cinecittà, conveniently on the same side of the city rather than an ocean away.

And he paid a real price for that insistence, too: shooting on location was so expensive that the film, originally planned for colour, had to be made in black and white. He chose the real Rome over a Technicolor Rome, and it shows. If Vienna is a city haunted by what happened, Rome is a city busy with what's happening now. There's comedy in it, and a genuine optimism, the feeling of a place that has decided to be alive again.

The one shadow in all that light is the gilded cage. Princess Ann, played by Audrey Hepburn, is a prisoner to duty, of the endless airless ceremony that's all that's really left of the old hereditary order she represents.

The film flits between the stifling protocol she's trapped inside and the ordinary life going on outside her window, and for a single day she gets to climb through it and become a person: the haircut, the gelato, the Vespa, the brief astonishing freedom of being nobody in particular.

And in the middle of that one stolen day, the film steals something too. The scene at the Mouth of Truth, where Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck) puts his hand into the ancient stone face and pretends it's been bitten off, that wasn't in the script. Peck borrowed the gag from comedian Red Skelton, told Wyler about it before the take, and the two of them agreed not to warn Hepburn. Her shriek is real. Her laughter afterwards is real.

The men who deal in stories

There's a common thread between the respective leads Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) and Joe Bradley, and it isn't their American passports. It's their trade. Both men make their living telling stories, and in each film that trade is shorthand for the state of their soul.

Holly writes pulp Westerns, the kind where the good man and the bad man are never in doubt. The entire film is the slow, painful work of dragging him into a world where his oldest friend is the villain and the clean line doesn't exist.

Joe is a down-on-his-luck journalist hunting for a scoop. He spends most of the film sitting on a dynamite story, the secret identity of a runaway princess, until what he's seen changes what he's willing to sell.

Two men in the business of narrative, both of whom have their narrative rewritten by what the city shows them.

There's a second pair of storytellers worth a thought, behind the camera. The Third Man was written by Graham Greene, a novelist who lived his whole career in moral half-light, more interested in the compromised than the clean. Roman Holiday was written by Dalton Trumbo.

Trumbo was blacklisted and couldn't put his name to the screenplay. His name wasn't restored to the credits until decades later, long after his death. There's a quiet irony there almost too neat to be real: a film about a public figure forced to hide who she truly is, written by a man erased from his own work.

Two ways to walk away

For all the distance between a noir and a romance, the two films end on the same gesture: one person walking away from another.

The Third Man closes on that long, still, merciless shot — Lime's lover Anna (Alida Valli) walking the length of the road and straight past Holly without a glance, anger and grief that need no words.

Roman Holiday ends in a press room, with Ann and Joe saying goodbye in public, in code, neither able to speak plainly, settling for the small mercy of acknowledging, just between them, what the day meant.

One walk-away is cold fury; the other is sad acceptance. Same shape, opposite key.

Of the two, it's Roman Holiday's ending that has impressed me the most, and that surprises me because I expected the noir to land the heavier blow. The trick is that Wyler lets you believe in the fairytale for the whole running time and then quietly refuses to grant it, and the film is more profound because of that restraint.

Why this double bill

I'll be honest about the simplest reason to watch them together: they're both magnificent, and everyone should see magnificent films. But the pairing does something neither does alone.

Set side by side, they show how genre works as a filter; how a director can take the same raw material, a wounded continent putting itself back together, and run it through suspense in one case and romance in the other, and hand the audience back two completely different truths about the same moment.

The Third Man's truth is that survival corrupts: in a city carved up and starving, the black market is the real government and the most charming man in Vienna is poisoning children for profit. The clean moral lines Holly brought with him simply don't apply in this place, and the film's hard lesson is that decency is a liability while combing through the wreckage.

Roman Holiday's truth is quieter and runs the other way: the old order is a beautiful cage, and the real life worth having is as an ordinary person doing ordinary things. While Ann has to continue with the obligations of royalty, at least she can hold onto the memory of that one perfect day.

Put together, the two films tell the same story in opposite keys — a person arriving with an inherited certainty and watching the post-war city take it apart. The war didn't only break buildings. It broke the old rules, and everyone left standing is improvising new ones.

That's true of their making, too: the most-quoted line in The Third Man (Welles inventing his Borgias-and-cuckoo-clock speech on the day) and the most-loved moment in Roman Holiday (Peck and Wyler ambushing Hepburn at the Mouth of Truth) are both unscripted, both spontaneous takes, both gifts captured on film because the people making them were ready to try something different.

You can't plan for that. You can only put yourself somewhere it might happen.

Prompt for key visual

Midjourney: "gouache illustration, deliberate cold-to-warm gradient a single long European cobblestone street in steep one-point perspective receding to a central vanishing point; the near foreground drowned in cold desaturated blue-grey shadow, rain-slicked stones, a leaning street lamp, a tilted unsettling angle, scattered post-war rubble, looming dark archways at the edges; warming through amber in the midground; the central far end blooming into warm golden sunlight and a bright open piazza under a soft Mediterranean sky; a single small solitary figure in silhouette seen from behind, walking away down the centre of the street toward the distant light; muted earth tones warming from cold shadow to gold along the depth of the road, the whole journey composed down the middle of the frame; heavy impasto brushwork, warm directional light at the vanishing point, quiet, cinematic"