The Invisible Border: “The Man Between”
“Wickedness,” Oscar Wilde wrote, “Is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.” Both The Third Man (1949) and The Man Between (1953), a film that suffers from perennial unfavorable comparison to Carol Reed’s earlier masterpiece, revolve around men whose attractiveness is inseparable from their amorality. But while Grahame Greene’s script for The Third Man ultimately strips away Harry Lime’s glamour, reducing him to a scurrying sewer-rat and a suicidal nihilist, The Man Between embraces the tragic romanticism of its more ambiguous anti-hero.
In the end the two films are not much alike, but the similarity of their basic premises makes comparison inevitable. Both concern a naive foreigner who arrives in a war-torn city rife with shady characters and baffling plots, and meets an elusive man who embodies the city’s dark heart. The differences start with the cities themselves, the look and atmosphere they impart to the films. Where Vienna in The Third Man is dark, tilting, dense, and ravishingly romantic—with its leprous rococo ornaments, decrepit palatial apartments, crumbling stone stairs and glistening cobbles—the divided Berlin of The Man Between is flat, emptied-out, whitened by snow. There are vast plains of ruins, flattened almost to the ground, numbing in their extent, and great shrouds of buildings standing in desolate squares. Hunched, bundled Berliners mutely pick away at the rubble, salvaging bricks. The general mood is chilly and blank; the muffling quiet of the snow represents the nerve-deadened, emotionless stoicism of the people.
The thin layer of white also preserves curving tracks of cars and bicycles, evidence of sinister, mysterious comings and goings. From the first scene, in which the young British heroine, Susanne (Claire Bloom), arrives and is met at the airport by her German sister-in-law Bettina (Hildegarde Neff), there are constant, murky hints that nothing is what it seems or as it should be. The viewer is made to share the baffled viewpoint of Susanne, who doesn’t speak German or understand the obscure skirmishes between East and West Germany. Observing that Bettina is in some furtive way linked to the saturnine, gloomily suave Ivo Kern (James Mason), Susanne assumes that they are having an affair. Attracted to him herself, she welcomes his attentions, hoping to save her brother’s marriage and unaware that Ivo is actually an East German agent trying to kidnap a West German spy.
Susanne, for all her naivité, is no gauche bumbler. As played by the luminously beautiful Claire Bloom, she has an elegant stillness, an inner glow of alertness and intelligence, and a dangerous openness to her surroundings. She first meets Ivo when she and Bettina visit the Eastern sector, which is hung with huge portraits of Lenin and Stalin, filmed with Reed’s trademark tilted shots. Ivo is no ideologue, just a man with a shady past looking out for himself. Nothing about him is ever clearly defined: his past, his loyalties, his crimes. He is less a man than a miasma.
No one trusts him, except a little boy on a bicycle whom he employs as a spy. This bleached, wizened, unsmiling child is ubiquitous throughout the movie, following and spying, peddling furiously through the wintry ruins, circling around and around making figure-8 tracks in the snow. At first he is creepy; later he is pathetic. A war orphan, he is so deprived and friendless that he has attached himself to Ivo as a father figure; the boy’s devotion has been bought with a bike. In theory, a child is useful because he won’t arouse suspicions: but in postwar Berlin, Ivo’s little boy is glaringly in someone’s pay, since, as a Berliner points out, “How else would a boy like that get a bicycle?”
Linguistically, culturally and morally ambidextrous, Ivo personifies the soiled, compromised spirit of his city, and its perverse allure for the wholesome, inexperienced heroine. He has James Mason’s peculiar seductiveness, with his blend of weary sophistication, wounded melancholy, and glittering cruelty. While Harry Lime brazenly defends his wrong-doing, Ivo is like a man with a terminal disease: resigned, full of regrets, and insidiously contagious. He was once a lawyer, until one day “the law just vanished.” But he doesn’t use his country’s crimes to justify himself. He served faithfully in the German army, as he reminds the too-forgiving Susanne: “I nearly did go to England once. Our plans were altered.”
There is no Major Calloway in The Man Between, no clear-cut voice of morality. Susanne’s brother is a kindly and competent British army doctor, but he is too busy to be any help, or to notice that is wife is in the grip of fear and guilt. There are no well-defined villains, only vague, faceless East German operatives too inept to be very threatening. They kidnap Susanne by mistake for Bettina, then scramble to cover their error, forcing Ivo to help her escape and smuggle her back across the border.
The film falls into two halves, neatly divided into day and night, West Berlin and East. The dividing line is not yet blockaded by the Wall; guardposts and checkpoints mark a border that is invisible yet all-important. In the Eastern sector, the film plunges into dark, suspenseful chase scenes through bombed-out buildings and construction sites: perhaps the most disorienting and hostile of all of Reed’s winter-night cityscapes. Susanne and Ivo wind up spending the night hiding out in a prostitute’s apartment in an icy, threadbare building. In a scene that is intimate and sexy, yet at the same time sad and troubling, Susanne invites Ivo to share her bed and tries to thaw his withered heart. It is an iconic meeting of innocence and experience: Ivo sees Susanne as a sheltered child who knows nothing about life, while she is irresistibly drawn to his dark knowledge.
“I can warm your feet for you,” he says. “It’s a pity you can’t do anything about my heart.”
He keeps rejecting her dreams of a future life together, but in the end he sacrifices himself to save her. He dies in the buffer zone between the two sides, destroyed by his inability to be one thing or the other: good or bad, West or East, villain or hero. The obvious symbolism can only suffer in comparison with the sublimely enigmatic ending of The Third Man; it is more straightforward tragedy than understated irony. The Man Between’s musical score reflects this: instead of the dry wit of a zither it has a haunting, mournful saxophone motif that suits both the wintry atmosphere and the film’s romantic heart.
Carol Reed was a London native, but of his best films, only one (The Fallen Idol) is set in England. His heroes are always outsiders: Holly Martins, the clueless American in The Third Man; Willems, the European renegade stranded in Borneo in Outcast of the Islands, the little French boy living in a London embassy in The Fallen Idol; Susanne adrift in Berlin. Johnny McQueen (James Mason) is in his home town, Belfast, but he is an “odd man out” because he’s dying: the ordinary world of the living has become a foreign country. Perhaps it was Reed’s position as the illegitimate son of the celebrated actor Herbert Beerbohm Tree that made him so sensitive to people who don’t fit into their surroundings. Doom, in his films, springs most often from encounters between blundering innocents who understand too little, and cynics who know too much. There is no happy medium, no road to knowledge that doesn’t pass through disillusionment.
by Imogen Sara Smith