The Revenant of Vienna: A Critical Comparison of Carol Reed's Film The Third Man and Bram Stoker's Novel Dracula
2005; Salisbury University; Volume: 33; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Crime, Deviance, and Social Control
ResumoThis city of dead appeared to be sole refuge for my unfortunate friend [...].1 In his prose fragment Augustus Darvell, Lord Byron established foundation for numerous subsequent tales of or one who returns from dead, in English literature. In fact, Byron's traveling companion John Polidori used poet's unfinished tale as basis for The Vampyre, which itself established many of motifs associated with most famous type of revenant. Polidori's tale also ignited vampire craze that still shows no sign of subsiding (Morrison and Baldick viii).2 Indeed, vampire has appeared in numberless media presentations, veritably saturating modern culture in guise after guise: the vampire has no fixed image and no fixed abode (Frost 27).3 The most famous vampire, of course, is title character of Bram Stoker's Dracula, who has appeared in numerous subsequent media adaptations. Building on foundation of Polidori's The Vampyre, Dracula-the greatest and most influential vampire novel ever written (Frost 52)-has informed Gothic literature for more than a century. The first cinematic production to capture Gothic essence of Dracula was F. W. Murnau's silent classic Nosferatu. did for cinematic vampire what Stoker did for his literary counterpart: he created a work that has informed Gothic cinema for more than eight decades. In fact, Roger Ebert argues, Murnau was making of Stoker, because Nosferatu inspired dozens of other Dracula films, none of them as artistic or unforgettable [...] (Nosferatu). Between them, Stoker and virtually wrote cultural text of vampire as society perceives it today. Moreover, numerous artists from Anne Rice to Tod Browning have engaged this text and added their own aesthetic nuances to multifarious incarnations of vampire. Another artist who has engaged and added to cultural text of vampire is Carol Reed, whose film The Third Man shares many qualities with Stoker's Dracula. Strictly speaking, of course, Reed's film tells story of a figurative revenant, not a vampire, but thematic closeness of his eponymous character, Harry Lime, to Stoker's Dracula, and cultural saturation of vampire-revenant theme from time of Polidori forward, clearly reveal themselves in Reed's masterpiece. The Third Man, then, is not a Gothic film in mold of Murnau's Nosferatu? However, it does reveal how deeply revenant, particularly vampire, has influenced Western cinema, for Harry Lime possesses characteristics of vampire even though The Third Man is not at all a tale of supernatural. Essentially, Reed takes revenant formula and figuratively redeploys it with inflections of vampire archetype as established by Dracula? As Graham Greene argues in his Preface to novel version of The Third Man, Even a film depends on more than plot, on a certain measure of characterization, on mood and atmosphere (9). Dracula and The Third Man do have superficial plot similarities. For instance, although both Dracula and Lime are eponymous protagonists, neither character appears frequently in his respective narrative. Of this aspect of film, Orson Welles, who plays Lime, remarks, matters in that kind of role is not how many lines have, but how few. What counts is how much other characters talk about you (Welles and Bogdanovich 221). Likewise, Dracula's presence in novel depends largely upon fact that other characters continually discuss him: Although he remains Off-stage' for most of time, Dracula is undoubtedly dominant figure throughout book (Frost 54). In other words, although neither Dracula nor Lime appears often in his respective work, each character serves as focal point of his story's plot. In another point of plot similarity, both protagonists are killed after prolonged chases-killed, as Glen K. S. Man says of The Third Man, with the full weight of justice (173). …
Referência(s)