Returning from a short holiday in Germany recently, I watched The Third Man again following a brief and unexpected conversation I had about the film with an ex-pat in a Frankfurt bar.
Watching the opening funeral scene, I suddenly began to make a connection between this classic post-war noir and the cult 1970s horror, The Wicker Man.
The misleading premise to both films are very similar. The burial of Harry Lime and, in The Wicker Man, the disappearance of a young girl, Rowan Morrison.
The films protagonists, Holly Martins played by Joseph Cotton and Sgt Neil Howie, (Edward Woodwood) both arrive as strangers and are treated sceptically as outsiders. Lured to a war-ravaged foreign city through his friendship to Harry Lime, Martins is met by the same wall of silence Sgt Howie experiences from the inhabitants of a remote Hebridean isle he himself has been lured by duty.
In Vienna, Martins is a fish out of water. Shocked by his friend's sudden death, he finds himself lost and alone in a foreign land whose people and ways his small-town American mentality cannot grasp. In The Wicker Man, Howie is a policeman from the Scottish mainland whose strong Christian beliefs alienate him from the island's Celtic paganism.
In contrast, Holly Martins is a bit of a bum. Living on past success as a pulp writer, he's now a drunk and broke to go with it. Certainly, the abstemious Sgt Howie would not approve. What they have in common is their faith, Martins in his old friend Harry Lime being a good guy and Sgt Howie, in God. I believe it is this shared loyalty that links these two screen characters beyond first appearances and indeed to their own ends.
A special screening of The Wicker Man with the film's lead choreographer, Stuart Hopps as a guest speaker will be showing at The Astor Theatre in Deal on October 31st. Tickets £7
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