Plasma Pool

Orson Welles lists Citizen Kane as his best film, Alfred Hitchcock opts for Shadow of a Doubt and Sir Carol Reed chose The Third Man—and I’m in all of them.

—Joseph Cotten

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Joseph Cotten is the great American actor. You can learn everything you ever need to know about this country in the twentieth century by watching Cotten in Citizen Kane (1941), aging from youthful idealism to alcoholic cynicism to miserly witticism; in Shadow of a Doubt (1943), everyone’s favorite serial killing uncle; and in The Third Man (1949), the innocent abroad in a postwar Europe he can’t understand, adrift in a murky sea of unforgivable ambiguity:

Cotten’s Holly Martins is a true rarity—the clueless hero—and the real thrill of the film is not watching him learn the truth about his oldest friend, about Vienna, about the world he thought he understood; it’s the ever-dawning realization, played out on Cotten’s subtle shrinking smirk, that he will never understand his friend, Vienna, or the world, no matter how much he learns.

You could see Cotten playing a fine Gatsby. Though Cotten’s face seems made to smile, there is always something sad, or angry, or desperate behind his grin. In Shadow of a Doubt, it’s the mask he wears to hide the quiet mania—“Good Old Uncle Charlie,” as everyone calls him, a role he plays in between bouts of widow murder. In The Third Man, when he goes to visit Anna one night, she giggles, “You’re drunk!” “Yes,” he slurs, in Cotten’s genteel southern accent, “Sorry.” Another actor might have made it a joke, but Cotten makes the line apologetic, self-deprecating, sounding not at all like a scoundrel—he can’t help himself. Cotten inevitably falls in love with things he can’t have or doesn’t understand—with Welles in Citizen Kane and The Third Man, with women in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and Third Man—but just like Gatsby, he never quite gives up, long after the dream is already behind him.

Or you could just as easily see Cotten playing a grand Nick Carraway—for isn’t Carraway the all-American second banana, recalling for our benefit the most magnificent failure of a man he ever met? What better role for Cotten, tethered inextricably to the legend of Orson Welles. The first time you see The Third Man, you wait for Welles—for that light-out-the-window entrance, for the cuckoo clock speech, for the desperate chase through the sewers. Welles gives the film its flash—but the more you watch the movie, the more you notice Cotten. It’s remarkable to watch the man’s face in the ferris wheel scene—while Welles soliloquizes, Cotten says almost nothing, but you can sense a lifetime of crushed dreams in his sad eyes—Harry Lime is his best friend. Holly has idolized him, flown to Vienna for him, chased his girl, chased his murderers. And now, Holly knows the truth. Harry Lime is, simply, evil—something Holly only knows from his awful little western novels.

Joseph Cotten as Holly Martins in Sir Carol Reed's "The Third Man" (1949)

Can’t you see Cotten as Carraway, and Welles as Gatsby—Carraway, carried away by the mad dreams of this strange and outlandish man, and Gatsby, spending a lifetime trying to turn himself into the man he wishes he could be? That is, after all, their exact dynamic in Citizen Kane—Cotten watches Welles with such longing in those early scenes, it’s hard not to laugh today. Yet half a century on, it’s Cotten who proves the most effective performer—not the Dreamer but his acolyte.

Harry Lime, an American who makes big money selling shit medication to foreigners, could be any corporate CEO, building sweatshops in Asia, cutting pharmaceutical deals in Africa, undercutting stockholders. In Harry Lime, we see Enron; in Harry Lime, we see the sort of politicians that lead us to Vietnam, to Iraq, to My Lai, to Abu Ghraib. All they are is little dots, Holly. Would you care if they died? Perhaps we respond more to Cotten now because we have all been mugged by men like Harry Lime and the bitter modern life they have created.

Or perhaps we simply don’t quite believe in great men—at least, not as much as we used to. Orson Welles is an interesting performer—his acting never gets enough credit, so willing to explore the grotesqueness of humanity; few performers have done so much with make-up, besides maybe Boris Karloff. And yet, you never quite feel empathy for Welles onscreen—no surprise that his best acting roles (Citizen Kane, The Third Man, Touch of Evil [1958]) depend on his characters’ mystery. Cotten is all empathy—when he grins, you cannot help but like him; when he drinks, often to excess, you cannot help but love his tortured soul.

Like few other movies, The Third Man rewards repeated viewings—not because you learn more on each watching, but because you truly come to understand what a useless protagonist Holly Martins is. He immediately dislikes Major Calloway, the one man in town who never tells him a lie, out of childhood loyalty and a misplaced anti-authoritarian bent—you can tell Holly fancies himself a renegade American in Vienna, and the first time you see The Third Man, that is what he seems to be. You can see the film being made that way—the wry, plucky American boy teaches the English coppers what-for while beating back the Russians—and Holly’s decision to “investigate” proves that he’s probably seen a few Humphrey Bogart movies.

Orson Welles as Harry Lime in "The Third Man"

As a detective, though, Holly’s not particularly effective. There are revelations throughout the film, but the only piece of knowledge Holly himself procures is the existence of “a third man.” Oh, he discovers that Harry was wrapped up with bad people—confirming everything Calloway tells him at the start. As a lover, Holly’s even worse—chasing after his dead friend’s girl, he tells her, “Can’t you see I’ve fallen in love with you?” with that same old Joseph Cotten grin, at once joking and not joking. Anna never shows a spark of interest in Holly, which is why that last shot is so perfect—there’s Holly, still thinking he just might get the girl, and Anna, just trying to get away from this silly, stupid man.

Cotten could play more than just sadness—in Shadow of a Doubt, he’s the all-American sociopath. With his family, he is the consummate uncle—a bachelor, beloved by all who meet him, quick with the wit. He shares a bond with his niece that borders on the unseemly—certainly, there’s more heat between the two of them than between the niece and her nominal love interest. But Cotten’s real depravity is chronological—like Percy Grimm, he was born too late for himself. Dreaming of a better time, borne back ceaselessly into the past, he takes out his aggression on merry widows, women living off the wealth of their dead husbands. There’s a sexual subtex—isn’t there always?—but the phenomenal thing about Cotten’s performance is how simply he modulates between insanity and familial gentility.

In The Magnificent Ambersons, Cotten plays precisely the man he hates in Shadow of a Doubt—an industrialist, a new rich, destroying the old world of old money, riding his automobile through town. The Magnificent Ambersons is a difficult film to grasp—at times, particularly in its first half, more beautiful and perfect even than Citizen Kane, and just as often marred by studio interference and lost footage—and one imagines a version where Cotten’s character is not so irrepressibly swell. Yet The Magnificent Ambersons provides the perfect prologue for the Cotten trifecta—Cotten creates the 20th century, and then, in Citizen Kane, The Third Man, and Shadow of a Doubt, lives to regret it.

Cotten combines everything great about the Old Hollywood stars—Jimmy Stewart’s aww-shucks nice-guy demeanor, Bogart’s cynical romance, Cary Grant’s charm. At times—particularly at his most vampiric in Shadow of a Doubt—his stone face almost resembles Buster Keaton. Cotten never had such grand success, but then, he never suffered for work. Unlike Welles, he worked steadily and happily. He was married for thirty years to one woman; when she died, he married another within a year, and lived with her until his death at the ripe old Jed Leland age of 89. His life story is not the stuff of great Hollywood legend. But like the man said: Citizen Kane, Shadow of a Doubt, The Third Man. Throw in Magnificent Ambersons as an appetizer and his little cameo in Touch of Evil as dessert. What else do you need out of movies?