After the Birthday Toast at the Graham Greene International Festival on the evening of Saturday 3rd October 2009 Dr. Charles Drazin spoke on "The Oklahoma Kid", or Holly Martins in the film of The Third Man (directed by Carol Reed, UK, 1949). He offered a sympathetic portrait of Holly Martins, the writer of "Westerns" and amateur investigator.Harry Lime, Dr. Drazin argued, has stolen the show for sixty years. He enters the film two-thirds the way through and takes part in only one big dialogue, yet everyone talks about him. Like Harry, the city of Vienna is beautiful and seductive, and both take the audience’s attention away from Holly Martins. Holly is not the brightest pin in the box, and not a very efficient detective. He is painfully lacking in confidence, and anyone whose closest friend is Harry Lime is not well-off for friends. At the end of the film he is not lucky in love either. Sophisticated people do not recognise him. Some cannot remember his name, or call him by the wrong name. While Kurtz tries his hand at flattery, Sergeant Paine’s good opinion of Holly’s books is not enough to feed his low self-esteem. Holly says of himself: “I’m just a hack writer who drinks too much, and falls in love with girls.” He belongs to a gallery of losers, and does everything in the wrong way, yet he stands up for all of us in the best way. Vienna has an air of moral abdication, and the only people who take moral stands are those who are paid to do so. Others do not want to become involved. Anna Schmidt thinks that Harry is dead, and the question of whether he was murdered or not does not matter to her. However, Holly’s moral antenna is still intact, as his scenes with Crabbin (at the Hotel Sacher) and Lime (on the Great Wheel) show. So he is a very important character in the story. He thinks about right and wrong, and he makes moral choices. His faith in humanity is paradoxically justified by Anna’s rejection of him.
Dr. Drazin lectures in Film Studies at Queen Mary College in the University of London. His publications include In Search of the Third Man (1999), Korda: Britain's Only Movie Mogul (2002), The Finest Years: British Cinema of the 1940s (1998) and The Man Who Outshone the Sun King: Ambition, Triumph and Treachery in the Reign of Louis XIV (2008).
