LEONARDO da VINCI, AND THE RENAISSANCE
Just felt like sharing a bit, so here goes...
Carol Reed’s THE THIRD MAN is one of those films that basically amounts to the perfect externalization of its character's insides. Shadow-strewn and bombed out, post WWII Vienna does a perfect imitation of Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles as they spar, not over moral grounds, but rather because Orson's on the run and Joe's in love with his girl - she's clearly still in love with Orson. He's an amoral self-involved murderer but she doesn't care an neither does Joe. But the fact that his "best friend's" still above the dirt, after supposedly being murdered, is making it fairly difficult for Joe to separate his bud's girl from her skirt. So Joe feeds his pal to the cops, chases him down into "hell", then plugs 'em. Perfectly reasonable considering the "profile" of the girl in question - but she hates him for it, even though it literally saves her life, (haven't we all been there?) and so do we.
"Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like 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."
Carol Reed’s THE THIRD MAN is one of those films that basically amounts to the perfect externalization of its character's insides. Shadow-strewn and bombed out, post WWII Vienna does a perfect imitation of Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles as they spar, not over moral grounds, but rather because Orson's on the run and Joe's in love with his girl - she's clearly still in love with Orson. He's an amoral self-involved murderer but she doesn't care an neither does Joe. But the fact that his "best friend's" still above the dirt, after supposedly being murdered, is making it fairly difficult for Joe to separate his bud's girl from her skirt. So Joe feeds his pal to the cops, chases him down into "hell", then plugs 'em. Perfectly reasonable considering the "profile" of the girl in question - but she hates him for it, even though it literally saves her life, (haven't we all been there?) and so do we.
