walking past Martins and ignoring him as he stands near the Vienna graveyard where Lime is buried. 50 Unlike most characters in a closing shot, Anna walks toward the camera and exits behind it, leaving Martins alone at the left of the screen among a line of barren trees. A moment of dead time follows, with the zither music playing and the unbalanced composition waiting to be filled. It is a remarkably artful and wistful ending, simultaneously repudiating the pleasures of melodrama and mourning their loss. In its last seconds, the film seems to wish for Lime's return, if only because he is the most colorful and 'alive' person we have met.
Harry Lime, 'crucified' in a sewer.
Such a delicate balancing act could only have been made possible by the forces of cultural history. The Third Man is one of the best and most representative films of a period when a certain kind of high art had fully entered public consciousness and when European sobriety and American entertainment sometimes worked in tandem. Greene was conscious of the formal dialectic required by the times, and in one of the earlier episodes of The Third Man, he comments upon it. Holly Martins is picked up by a mysterious cabdriver in front of the Sacher hotel and driven through the dark streets at high speed. 'Have you got orders to kill me?' Martins shouts, but the driver ignores him, turning a corner and slamming on the brakes in front of an imposing building. The doors burst open, and the bewildered Martins finds himself at a Kafkaesque gathering of the 'British Cultural Reeducation Service,' where he is the guest of honor. He is introduced as ''Mr. Holly Martins, from the other side,' and a series of grotesque characters pepper him with questions: 'Do you believe, Mr. Martins, in the stream of consciousness?' 'Now Mr. James Joyce, where would you put him?' Hopelessly confused, Martins tells the disappointed group that his chief influence is Zane Grey.
In this scene, Greene is obviously satirizing middlebrow culture (how often he must have been asked the same questions), but he is also paying homage to the literature that shaped his career. The first book he read as a child was a potboiler called Dixon Brett, Detective, and his first act upon visiting Paris in the 1920s was to make his way to Sylvia Beach's bookshop, where he purchased a copy of Ulysses. 51 The Third Man brings these two literary extremes and two kinds of pleasure into melancholy union, and in the process it achieves a distensive or double-edged irony characteristic of Greene's thrillers in general: on the one hand, the emotional flourishes and intensities of melodrama are treated with modernist skepticism; but on the other hand, scenes of everyday life are haunted by a bloody and romantic passion.
Historians have long known that Billy Wilder originally filmed a different ending to Double Indemnity. In the first version, insurance agent Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) was put to death in a California gas chamber. Wilder once told an interviewer that Neff's death was among 'two of the best scenes I've ever shot in my whole life' (the other being the original opening to Sunset Boulevard); it was, however, a controversial way to end the film, and he eventually dropped it because he felt that an execution was 'unnecessary.'
Perhaps Wilder was correct to make this choice. Few would deny that Double Indemnity is a definitive film noir and one of the most influential movies in Hollywood history. Then again, Wilder may have cut something important because of pressure from both the studio and the Breen
Office, which insisted that the gas chamber sequence was 'unduly gruesome.' 53 Unfortunately, critics have never really debated the issue; they usually take the director's statements at face value, arguing that a protracted depiction of death by gas would have been unnecessary and inappropriately grim.
In what follows, I propose a contrary view, based in part on the closing pages of Wilder's and Raymond Chandler's script, and in part on the internal evidence of the film itself. Walter Neff's death in the gas chamber (which was not suggested by the James M. Cain novella) is a logical outgrowth of several important motifs in Double Indemnity, and it reveals the full implication of those motifs. Without it, claims investigator Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) seems a less morally complex character, audiences are left feeling a bit more comfortable, and the film's critique of American modernity becomes less apparent. (The only Hollywood feature of the period that treated the theme of industrial progress with greater despair and sophistication was Welles's Magnificent Ambersons, which also lost its original ending.)
Even in its released form, Double Indemnity was an unorthodox film, challenging nearly a decade of Production Code resistance to James M. Cain's fiction. Although it contains no explicit sex or violence, it defies the PCA in at least three ways, which were spelled out by the Breen Office in a March 15, 1943, report to Paramount: first, it depicts an attractive pair of murderers who 'cheat the law and die at their own hands'; second, it deals 'improperly' with the theme of adultery; and third, it is 'replete with explicit details of the planning of [a] murder.' The story of how the script eventually gained Joseph Breen's approval has been told by Leonard Leff and Jerrold Simmons in their useful history of Hollywood censorship, The Dame in the Kimono, and the equally interesting story of Wilder's tense but productive collaboration with novice screenwriter Chandler can be found in Frank MacShane's Life of Raymond Chandler.54 I see no reason to go over this familiar ground, but I do want to show how the original ending of the film grew out of the preoccupations of its various writers. For my purposes, the important point to remember is that Wilder, Chandler, and Cain shared an outsider's or modernist intellectual's ambivalence toward Los Angeles, where Cain's novel was set. Under Wilder's supervision, this ambivalence was intensified to the point where the city seemed less like the urban sprawl described by Cain, and more like a dangerously seductive Eldoradoa center of advanced capitalism, instrumental reason, and death. The truly controversial aspect of the original film was not so much
its depiction of sex and murder, but its grimly sardonic vision of a 'Taylorized' or assembly-line America, culminating in the gas chamber sequence.
Of the three writers connected with the project, Cain was the least inclined to see California in dystopian termsthis despite the fact that he began his career as a journalist and university teacher on the East Coast and served briefly as an editor of The New Yorker. Like Dashiell Hammett, Cain was a veteran of World War I who wrote about violence and who published with Blanche and Alfred Knopf. 55 The celebrated first sentence of The Postman Always Rings Twice was in fact a quintessential example of the hard-boiled manner: 'They threw me off the hay truck about noon.' But Cain avoided the pulps and did not write detective fiction; instead, he specialized in Dostoyevskian narratives of criminal psychology, transposed into lower-class America and strongly influenced by the naturalism of Theodore Dreiser, the modernism of Ring Lardner, and the cultural criticism of H. L. Mencken. He was therefore discussed alongside such 'serious' writers as John O'Hara, William Saroyan, and Nathanael West, whom Edmund Wilson dubbed 'poets of the tabloid murder.'56 Cain himself described his novels as a type of American tragedy, dealing with the ''force of circumstance' that drives an individual to the 'commission of a dreadful act' (quoted in Hoopes, 551). Actually, he was closer to the spirit of melodramanot so much the melodrama of Hollywood, but of a certain kind of grand opera, in which the players are swept along on currents of violent desire. He often wrote about opera singers (in his youth he had wanted to become one), and he deliberately set out to 'musicalize' emotions. His protagonists spoke in deadpan voices and lived in a world of pure kitsch, but they behaved like lovers in Carmen.
Although he was never especially good at writing film scripts, Cain enjoyed Hollywood.
In one of his most widely discussed essays, 'Paradise' (1933), he attacked Southern California's automobile fetishism, bad food, and lack of organic culture; in the same breath, however, he declared that the state was populated by a more talented class of people than other parts of the country, and that 'some sort of destiny awaits this place' (quoted in Hoopes, 226). He especially liked the sunny climate, and at one point he declared that all the great American novels had their roots in western populism. His approach to Double Indemnity seemed to confirm these mixed feelings, suggesting a symbiosis between modernity and literary modernism: he offered a darkly satiric account of the California insurance industry, but his style was simple, direct, speedyperfectly expressive of modern industrial values. Liberty, the slick-paper
