To Eastern European ears, the zither may not sound so strange emanating from a big screen; but when Western audiences first gazed upon director Carol Reed’s 1949 picture, “The Third Man,” the score had a big impact on people’s reaction to the film—despite the movie itself featuring a legendary performance by Orson Welles and being considered a masterpiece of crime drama—now filed under the genre “film noir.”
Spawned from pulp novels portraying protagonists with questionable morals and generally failing to conclude in an “It’s a Wonderful Life” fashion, film noir was one of the great artistic achievements of cinema in the 20th century and it doesn’t get much better than “The Third Man.” The film has all the indicators of a typical noir feature—dark, smoky alleys, unusual camera work and unsettling depictions of moral depravity. What distinguishes the film most and propels it into the echelon of inimitable success is its musical score, arranged and performed by Anton Karos. The original trailer couldn’t have put it better when it states, “His zither will put you in a dither.”
A zither is a type of acoustic guitar with a wide range of notes, producing a sound somewhere between a typical guitar and a mandolin. Used by folk bands of Eastern Europe it also conjures sounds of Spanish classical guitar. However, one would never associate its plucking with a major motion picture. Despite the emergence of this new, artistically driven mode of filmmaking, before “The Third Man,” noirs still too often succumbed to the clichéd string arrangement scores of their predecessors. The cleanly plucked zither of “The Third Man” often teeters around in the back of the film’s consciousness, projecting a breezy, weightless feel to the disquieting drama afoot for the characters. Later, it will be used with incredible effect to soundtrack the fast-paced sequences of Graham Green’s exciting story.
A zither hardly seems appropriate for the film’s subject matter, but the plot unfolds at a streamlined pace; only occasionally upping the intensity in large doses.
Suspense novelist Holly Martens (Joseph Cotton) arrives in post-war Vienna to meet his friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) who has promised him a job, only to find that Harry had just been killed by a car. The details of his death are hazy at best and contain contradictions. Holly’s search for the truth of his best friend’s fate unwinds through the eerie streets of bombed out Vienna, and often hits difficulties because of the language barrier—convoluted more so by the city’s division into French, British, American and Russian sectors after World War II. On location shooting and acting from some of Hollywood’s biggest stars lend the film immense integrity, yet the score remains an asset to the story as much as Welles’ larger-than-life presence or the war-torn urban environment.
When Holly must flee from various pursuers he runs through the cold, dark streets of the Austrian capital while Karos’ surefooted playing increases in tempo. Other films of the time would have used escalating strings in sharp, varying slices of volume to escalate the feelings of suspense. Karos’ zither has though now become the perfect orchestra for the chase—instead of disconnected strings that had been well-worn by then, his zither effectively becomes a narrator for the trouble Harry finds himself in. It’s another voice in the film, conducting with beauty and nonchalance an aura for the picture that cannot be diminished with age.
Movies were never categorized as film noirs until critics and scholars, after its heyday (1941-1958), began to recognize the phenomenon of like-minded films that devoted their attention to the underbelly of the world—a world indeed that was always present but was too often suppressed. With WWII, the morally corrupt tendencies of humanity bubbled up to the surface; and nothing better represents this ascendency of human beings’ selfish, murderous side than film noir. The genre subverted major film’s subject matter and questioned the status quo in America and the Western world as a whole. Karos’ zither in “The Third Man” further supplanted the noir style as an artistic force and welcomed greater freedom of expression for popular motion picture scores.
A film’s music can exist in the background and make loud splashes when the action demands it or it can add such a peculiar effect to the film so as to give it its own mystique, sowing the story and its characters into the heads of audiences well after the final credits roll.
