I was just watching special edition DVD-it has an extra disc with background and commentary.
I cannot figure out Anna-she knows that Lime is a cheat and a killer-yet she loves him-why? Even when Holly confronts her with the evidence of Lime’s unspeakable crimes (the deaths of the children from menengitis), she stays loyal to him…and even after she learns that Lime has turned her in to the russians.
Is Anna a representative of the “Old Vienna” that Greene is nostalgic for?
She is only happy when she is with Lime-and disdains Holly’s efforts to help her (she ignores him at Lime’s funeral).
Carol Red did an excellent jon-post-war Vienna is like a city of zombies, scuttering around and only out at night.
I highly recommend the new DVD set.
My take is, Harry was charming and a survivor (not inconsiderable qualities in a city that recently got its ass handed to it in a huge war), and anything he did contrary to this perception was the result of weasels like Holly twisting his arm (Her POV, not mine). Sociopaths can be very convincing.
A person doesn’t change just because you find out more.
It’s probably part of that whole “lovable Bad Boy” thing.
In the initial funeral scene, the Austrian (RC) priest is delivering the burial service for Lime/Harbin in german-wouldn’t this have been latin (in 1949 Vienna)?
The mass would have been, but not the actual burial.
The burial ritual at that time included both Latin and vernacular prayers.
And within the Mass, the sermon would have been in the vernacular.
As for the OPs question, people stick by their loved ones through things like abuse, child abuse (emotional, physical and sexual) or jail terms; many women put up with abuse for themselves but leave when the abuser starts on the kids, others stay and may even blame the kids for the abuse they’re suffering. Lime’s specific faults don’t trigger Anna’s specific “oh my god I have to get out of here” reflexes.
I guess the most poignant moment in the film, is when Major Calloway takes Holly to the children’s ward in the hospital-and sees the death of the child (due to Lime’s adulterated penicillin). The nurse tosses the poor child’s toy bear into the trash-so sad!
Holly tells Anna all about this…“you talk about him (Lime) as if he had occasional bad manners”-and she also knows that her beloved Harry has told the Russians about her-whereas Holly tires to help her…and she snubs him…weird!
Weird but very true to life. I’ve known women (and men) behave in just this fashion when confronted with the outright nastiness of someone they’re besotted with. They show anger and contempt towards the person revealing the truth and become if anything even more fixated in their passion.
Holly is the classic “nice guy” with nothing to offer but presents and the sort of uninformed optimism that expires in the penurious, extralegal world of post-war Vienna like a patient given diluted black market penicillin. Anna was a woman without a country; her own native country (Czechoslovakia) was first partitioned as part of the Munich Agreement (“Peace in our time!”) and then consumed by the Soviet Union, with the Allied nations unwilling to offer her political asylum and allowed thousands to be shipped to political prisons without objection. Is it any surprise she has such little faith in the rule of law or concern about Lime’s underhanded dealings? And as for her love for Lime, while obviously not logical, it is what it is. Lime is undoubtedly a charming man–even his speech on the Prada wheel, delivered with velveted menace, shows him to be clever and amusing–and knowing that he’s done bad things doesn’t change that.
The story. written by Graham Greene, is of course filled with disturbingly prescient allegory; in this case, a subtext of the United States trampling over its own oversized paws to engage with the Soviet Union in the Cold War without understanding the underlying strife and conflict of the European players. Holly Martins is the quintessential American optimist, ignoring Major Calloway’s pleas to “be a good chap and go back home,” so he can prove his dead friend Harry to be innocent of wrongdoing, and instead leads not only Harry’s genuine death (ironically, at Holly’s hand) but revealing Anna to be living under false papers. Everyone Holly cared about would have been better off if he’d followed Calloway’s advice. The film serves as an antidote to the saccharine and often jingoistic prewar and early war films like Casablanca and To Have and Have Not; less “This time I know our side will win,” and more, “But the dead are happier dead. They don’t miss much here, poor devils.”
A great film; Carol Reed’s direction and his so carelessly British opening monologue–“Of course a situation like that does tempt amateurs [Dead body floating in the river] but, well, you know, they can’t stay the course like a professional,”–are brilliant, and Graham’s cast of characters and cutting dialogue are amazing, as is Anton Karas’ zither score, which somehow manages to be whimsical and mournful at the same time.
Stranger