I went to see “Duck Soup” in a local indie theater last week and they showed a preview for the “Third Man”. Towards the end of the trailor, they refered to “Harry Lime” as an “Anti-Hero”.
Now, correct me if I’m worng, since I’ve only seen the movie once, but didn’t he sell bad medicine to childern? That’s not anti-heroism, that’s just plain villianous. An anti-hero tends to do things for his own benefit but you often don’t mind because those who suffer are usually fairly nasty people anyway, so there’s a “They deserved it” feeling.
But I can’t think of childern being crippled from bad medicine as anything but horrible, “Cuckoo clock” speech non-withstanding.
Is there a part of the movie I’m not remembering, or did the person making the trailer miss that?
That happens sometimes, but more generally I’d say an anti-hero is a character - usually the protagonist - who doesn’t have heroic qualities. Harry definitely has no heroic qualities.
Harry’s character did get something of a makeover for the subsequent radio series The Lives of Harry Lime, also starring Orson Welles, portraying Harry in his pre-Third Man years in which he was more of an roguish international adventurer.
It seems to me that the idea of Harry as a roguish international adventurer is exactly why he gets in this situation to begin with. Isn’t this more or less how Joseph Cotton describes him initially? Forgive me, because it has been a while since I last saw this film.
You know, I was thinking the same thing as I typed that. I guess you could say that in the radio series he was a roguish international adventurer who hadn’t yet sold diluted penicillin.
Yeah. THere was a bunch of little kids there as well as adults…and a good bunch of them were laughing their heads off.
A new generation of Marxists are on the way
I nevernoticed before that in the Newspaper Article at the beginning, at the very end of the paragraph, it says “He promises to rule with an Iron hand”.
The Marx brothers play the kind of characters who are quite funny onscreen, but if you met them in real life, you’d be far less amused when they set your hat on fire(not on your head) or chased you around on a bicycle.
The '50s television show The Third Man starring Michael Rennie also had Lime as a dashing international adventurer - always a gentleman, respected by most everyone still with a suggestion of the shaddy.
Still, I think the film version satisfies the requirements of an antihero, even if the subsequent radio and television programs do not.
Sort of like O’Henry’s Cisco Kid was something of a cad but subsequent movies, radio and television programs (at least, I think it was on the radio) made him classier.
There should be a difference between an anti-hero and a villain. An anti-hero should have some redeeming characteristics and should avoid harming the innocent. Examples would include The Man With No Name and Wolverine. Someone who sells tainted medicine and waffles up some sub-Nietzchean justification for his atrocities isn’t an anti-hero. He’s a villain.
I disagree. A villain is a person that goes against the hero. In my mind both The Man With No Name and Wolverine are heros (ones with attitude to be sure, but heros none the less)
I think the Webster’s definition above pretty much captures an anti-hero.
Bisides the ones mentioned earlier, Stoker’s Dracular comes to mind, as does Sax Rohmer’s Fu Man Chu.
I don’t know about that really. I can think of several things Harpo did to various friends and strangers over the years that were truly hysterical but I can’t really say they had it coming.
Gotta stop making this thread veer off course (he said sotto voce as he receded quietly into the background.)
Hmm. You may be right. Then again, most of the time Harpo was innocent and not malicious. He was just odd. Groucho and Chico could actually pick on people.
Then Lime’s still a villain, because he goes against the hero, whatsisname, the western writer. True he’s a bland hero who battles Lime reluctantly, but once he sees the horror of Lime’s crime he has no problem fighting him.
This may have been the Catholic writer Graham Greene’s point. In making his protagonist bland and uninteresting and his villain suave and charming, he may have been repeating the old christian lesson that evil can be charming and good may appear bland but good is still good and evil is still evil.
While I think this is an interesting point I’m still inclined to think Lime tends to be more of an anti-hero. I suppose it depends on whether he is the protagonist or the reporter is, doesn’t it?
[sub] But of course a definite anti-hero would be any character W.C. Fields ever played.[/sub]
How could Lime possibly be the protagonist? He’s off-screen for the majority of the movie. Joseph Cotton’s character is clearly the protagonist, and may even be an anti-hero himself. He’s kind of pathetic, he drinks too much, etc. . . . not your standard heroic figure, and yet he does the right thing and you sympathize with him. Lime, on the other hand, may be suave and witty, but a lot of villains are suave and witty.
Even though Lime is not on screen, he drives the action of the film. He is clearly the main character, the protagonist. The Joseph Cotton character is merely a stand in for the audience blundering into information finding the sordid truth out about the main character.
If Lime is indeed the villian or antagonist he must be in opposition of the protagonist which you suggest is Cotton. Despite sort of turning on him in the final scenes of the film, Cotton never really is in opposition of Lime.
The whole house of cards comes falling down because Cotton tries to find out what really happened to his friend.
And two last arguments that are easily knocked down by the use of examples: If Cotton’s character is the protagonist, why can’t we remember character’s name without looking on IMDB.com and why does the title describe Harry Lime.
