Power and glory without moral footing …

… Resurrecting the Third Man | Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Although leavened by theological hope, Greene’s story is, in his narrator’s words, “grim and sad and unrelieved.”  Reed, however, had the visual wit to turn it into popular entertainment.  He brightened Greene’s grayness without sacrificing any of his provocative darkness.  What seems bleak on the page fairly blazes on the screen, nowhere more so than when Welles makes his justly famous entrance as Harry Lime, a name with a distinctively demonic aura.  “Old Harry” is British slang for Satan, and Lime, as Harry’s dialogue reminds us, suggests limelight and Lucifer’s pre-fallen splendor.  After hearing the other characters discuss this scoundrel obsessively for 59 minutes, we become—at least on first viewing—accustomed to thinking of him as an absence whose presence is felt everywhere, almost a Thomistic version of evil.  Then Lime suddenly appears, and the screen flares with an energy that we could hardly have anticipated.  Old Harry will only be on screen for 11 minutes, but what an 11 minutes!