He does not plead for understanding but explains his role in a perverse world - the quote is just that, a calculated perversity intended to make the audience think - not on historical arguments but on the contradictory nature of society - and it works just as well today as it did fifty years ago.
In another context it might have been the mediterrean influence as against that of the alps - the point is not the factuality of the reference but what it invokes - it is the difference between prose and poetry.
The last part of the wheel scene:
Harry: "You're just a little mixed up about things in general. Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't so why should we, they talk about the people and the proletariat, I talk about the suckers and the mugs, its the same thing."
"They have their five year plans and so have I."
Holly: "You use to believe in God."
Harry: "I still do believe in God, old man. I believe in God and mercy, all that, but the dead are happier dead. They don't miss much here poor devils."
"What do you believe in?"
<Snip> Harry talks of Anna, offers partnership to Holly<Snip>
"Don't be so gloomy. Afterall its not that awful. As the fella says: In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
"So long Holly"
Holly looks on. Scene ends as Harry departs.
Bretch would have loved this I think and so do I. It is powerful, provocative and designed to be so. Carol Reed's envisioning of Graham Greene's novel (he also wrote the screen play), that magical music by Anton Karas, is superb by any measure (not one of the best films this is advertising hype - but film as a work of art pure and simple).
Greg Schofield Perth Australia g_schofield at dingoblue.net.au _______________________________________________ _______________________________________________
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--- Message Received --- From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at alexia.lis.uiuc.edu> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Date: Tue, 19 Mar 2002 14:40:37 -0600 Subject: Re: The Third Man Quote
In an essay years ago someone neatly turned the tables on this remark by pointing out that Switzerland also produced the Liberal historian Jacob Burckhardt, who invented the Renaissance (in his 1860 book Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien). The thoroughly ideologized notion of the Renaissance as another giant step in the Long March of Freedom that led from Caesar to Bill Gates misrepresents several generations of frenzied intellectual reaction and loss of nerve amongst European intellectuals in response to the breakdown of the medieval mode of production in the 14th century. The intellectuals -- later called "Renaissance Humanists" by their epigoni -- reacted as we have to admit intellectuals usually do, by sucking up to power, e.g. the Borgias and the Medicis, and the Valois and the Tudors. (As for the artists, David Hockney suggests they did it all with mirrors -- or at least lenses.) --CGE
On Tue, 19 Mar 2002, joanna bujes wrote:
> At 09:31 PM 03/18/2002 -0500, Sergio wrote:
>
> > Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and
> >bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the
> >Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of
> >democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
> >
> > Harry Lyme
>
> This signature bugs me.
>
> You could argue that warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed produced
> the great renaissance artists, or you could argue that the craft
> system of the middle ages produced the renaissance artists. (Have you
> not noticed how the Renaissance claims credit for ALL the good stuff
> that was laboriously worked out in the high middle ages?)
>
> Even if peace, brotherly love, and democracy do not produce great art
> (and that's a big "if"), they do produce a life worth living, which is
> a much greater thing than the most perfect object.
>
> And then consider the speaker of the preceding: Harry Lyme, the
> fictional war profiteer who has sold watered down penicillin in order
> to make money during WWII. True, "Third Man" argues is that no one
> came out of that one with clean hands and that everyone had their
> balance sheets out while "watching those little dots down there" from
> bombing height. -- but except for the extent to which Harry (or the
> movie) exposes the hypocrisy of his accusers, what is that makes this
> man your hero?
>
> Joanna
>
>