THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
The first thing you'll want to know is, does that evocative Anton Karas theme feature at all? It does, albeit very briefly. It caused quite a stir at the time as the whole of the original film was scored with just a zither.
Carol Reed's iconic 1949 film noir, with a screenplay by Graham Greene, concerns Holly Martins, a naive writer of pulp Westerns who arrives in bombed out postwar Vienna to meet an old friend, Harry Lime. He finds that Lime has apparently been killed in a suspicious accident and in trying to discover the facts, he learns so much about his old friend that when [spoiler] he finally finds him alive, he wishes he were dead.
Orson Welles' late entrance in the suspense filled movie is probably one of the greatest ever. A woman throws open her window to loudly protest about the disturbance in the darkened street below and in doing so casts light on a doorway opposite, where we catch a fleeting glimpse of elegant, mysterious, Lime. Robert Krasker's Oscar winning cinematography, all tilted angles and chiaroscuro lighting, lent Vienna a macabre decadence and was perfectly attuned to Greene's pessimistic themes.
This was a city where desperation and the black market tainted everyone, and Reed and Greene perfectly encapsulated that sense of exhausted ennui. These characters were war-weary, vengeful, and there were no heroes.
All this makes for unpromising material for a musical and despite the great names involved here, they don't manage to settle on a style or equivalent tone to make it work in its new format. Part of the problem is that musicals (Sondheim excepted) mostly trade in characters who express themselves emphatically, heart on your sleeve emotion and good triumphing over evil. There's none of that here and Greene's great characters are reduced to just musical theater archetypes.
In the original the sultry Alida Valli brought an ambivalence to Holly's 'love interest', Anna. Here Natalie Dunne presents her as a blonde ingenue. Instead of performing in a Viennese operetta she sings in the equivalent of the Hot Box, again a jarring tone, and you expect Nathan Detroit or Mickey Rooney to burst in.
Similarly, Sam Underwood's Holly is totally at sea. Cotton gave him a quiet gravitas, but here he seems like a whiny back packer wishing his gap year would end. He cries and simpers and is a hot mess. Edward Baker-Duly is great however as the sardonic, British, Major Calloway, who tries to set him to rights about the world.
Rather coyly Lime is not listed in the cast but is played by Simon Bailey who doubles up (in a frightful wig) as Crabbit, the wily old cove running the cultural evenings. Wilfrid Hyde-White played him to perfection in the film and again there was a duality to him, but here he's stock character.
In the famous Ferris wheel scene Bailey, as Lime, declaims, whereas Welles purred like the charmer he was. You also get the impression he wouldn't put up with this Holly for a second longer and would gladly push him out of the window.
While Black and Hampton's book struggles with tone, the songs don't help matters. Musically there's a pleasing range but they are fragmented and stop the action, which is a problem in a thriller. Often they even totally contradict the key emotion in the scene. Again, film noir thrives on dry understatement and things being left unsaid, here there's bombast or just a deadening literalism. A well-marshaled ensemble cast do serve the songs well, however.
Trevor Nunn's direction (it's all luminaries here) is wonderfully nimble, marshaling a large cast on a tight apron stage and Paul Farnsworth's designs are simple and beautifully detailed. The problem isn't the detail here though it's the whole picture.
