The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Films of the week From Vienna to Delhi on a journey of 70 years
THE THIRD MAN Thursday, BBC Four, 9pm
ACITY of ruins, long shadows and crazy angles – and a film to match, in the form of Carol Reed’s 1949 noir masterpiece which pits British actor Trevor Howard, star of Brief Encounter, against laconic American counterpart Joseph Cotten.
It’s a story about evil, misplaced loyalty and absence, and the space around which Cotton’s Holly Martins and Howard’s Major Calloway dance is the one once occupied by the person of Harry Lime.
He has been a friend of Martins’ since childhood but to Calloway and his team of military policemen he’s a notorious pedlar of bad black market penicillin and little better than a killer. To Lime’s girlfriend Anna (the great Italian actress Alida Valli), he’s just another man who took her for a ride. But where is he?
The city is Vienna, still looking bombed-out and exhausted four years after the end of the war. Lime, of course, is played by Orson Welles, though you don’t expect that from the opening scenes as Martins arrives in the city to hook up with his old friend only to learn that he has been killed in a mysterious road accident outside his own flat. Martins, a pulp fiction writer, is suspicious (rightly), particularly when he learns that, besides the two friends of Lime’s who carried the body away, there was a third man whose identity can only be guessed at.
Calloway is suspicious for different reasons. The truth, when we finally arrive at it, is stranger still.
The exquisite cinematography is by Robert Krasker, who shot the spooky marsh scenes for David Lean’s Great Expectations and was heavily influenced by German Expressionism, and the screenplay is by none other than Graham Greene. Anton Karas’s zither score is iconic, as is Welles’s speech about cuckoo clocks. If you’ve never watched it, you’re in for a treat.
If you have, there’s always something new to find, especially if you dug out Citizen Kane after watching the Oscar-nominated Mank on Netflix: Cotten and Welles were regular collaborators and in Citizen Kane Cotten plays Jed Leland, best friend to Welles’s Charles Foster Kane.
Some of that same relationship is played out here, a fact which wouldn’t have been lost on Cotten, Welles, Reed or Greene when they decamped to Vienna
in December 1948 to shoot the film on its wrecked streets.
THE WHITE TIGER Netflix
Now streaming
Nominated for an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay at next month’s Academy Awards, this adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s 2008 Booker Prize winner stars Adarsh Gourav as Balram Halwai, a poor-but-clever kid in rural Rajasthan who finds a way out of poverty by becoming a driver for a family of local bigshots. Each step of his way demands ruthlessness, coaxing, persuasion and exploitation and sees him suborned, abused and maltreated in turn.
But with each step he comes closer to achieving his goal of escape – a goal he appears to have achieved as the film opens and we see him pony-tailed and expensively dressed, sitting at his desk typing an email to a visiting Chinese premier.
In it he lays out his achievements and some of his worldview, and it’s that which forms the film’s framing device and the basis for the flashbacks which follow.
By this point he’s in Bangalore, India’s version of Silicon Valley, and he has changed his name, partly on account of his yen for reinvention but mostly because he’s wanted for murder.
The bulk of the action takes place much earlier, in Delhi, where Balram’s chief employer Ashok (Rajkummar Rao) lives in high-rise splendour with his US-educated wife Pinky (Indian mega-star and former Miss World winner Priyanka Chopra Jonas) while Balram beds down in the basement garage with the other drivers.
On his rare visits home,
Balram is chastised by his grandmother for not sending enough money and threatened with marriage to a local girl.
He has other plans, though, and having seen off one of the family’s drivers – he blackmails him into leaving after he finds out he’s Muslim – he makes himself indispensable, driving Ashok and his uncle from government department to government department as they distribute bribes, and even signing a false confession when scandal threatens to engulf the family. And when he sees his chance, he takes it.
Throughout, Balram likens India’s vast underclass to chickens in a coop. They know they’re for the chop, can smell the blood already spilled, but they never try to escape. Instead they meekly accept their fate.
Not him, though – and if there’s blood to be spilled, it won’t be his.