Section:GDN 12 PaGe:4 Edition Date:190906 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 5/9/2019 17:13 cYanmaGentaYellowblac

• The Guardian
  4 Friday 6 September 2019

As the classic noir gets

a re-release, it is hard

to ignore the parallels

between the shattered

Vienna it portrays and

the future Britain faces,

writes  Danny Leigh

W

hat perfect timing for

The Third Man to step

back out of the shadows.

Often hailed as the fi nest

fi lm Britain ever made,

a 70th anniversary

re-release will see it return to cinemas with the

government much in the market for symbols

of national greatness. In fact t here could be no

better moment for The Third Man to reappear

• just not as a cosy patriotic treat. Rather, it is a
  cold premonition of no-deal Britain.
  In that, there is a certain poetry. We are where
  we are in no small part due to endless British war
  fi lms. But The Third Man is a postwar movie.
  American writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten)
  arrives in Vienna to meet, then mourn, his
  friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles), but the city he
  fi nds tells a bitter truth about life after wartime.
  “Smashed and dreary,” Graham Greene wrote
  in the novella drafted as a treatment.
  Barring the unexpected, we will soon live to
  see the resemblance. With Europe declining to
  drive us into the shelters, no deal provides the
  solution by dropping a bomb on ourselves.
  Reed and Greene show us the future that
  follows. “The classic period of the black
  market,” the voiceover calls it, an ugly scuttle
  of murky characters , an impoverished place
  carved up by predatory powers. The screen
  fi lls with parallels between then and our soon-
  to-be now. Offi cial versions of Harry’s death
  hum with disinformation; his lover Anna is
  a refugee, terrifi ed of being caught with the
  wrong papers; malign Russian infl uence lurks.
  But most of all, there are the vultures. To the

crooks Greene found at work in the Viennese

debris, the godsend of war was allowing them

room to get rich. Brexit will be the same:

a once-in-a-lifetime chance to tip a whole

country into a handful of pockets. Disaster

capitalism is just the modern name.

Enter – in that deathless fl ash of nightlight

• Harry Lime. Because what is Lime if not
  a pioneer disaster capitalist, grasping the
  opportunities presented by chaos with a stash
  of tainted penicillin? Now, near the endgame,
  the point of the past three years is obvious –
  making possible the feral economy in which
  business minds such as Harry thrive, stripped
  of “red tape”, profi t its own unarguable logic.
  “Free of income tax, old man,” he twinkles.
  It almost feels too on-the-nose that his
  racket takes place in the ultimate captive
  market – medicine. When the fi lm was fi rst
  released, the NHS was a year old. Now, it
  survives as the grand prize in a US trade deal
  Britons are assured we are fi rst in line for,
  an army of Harrys poised to sell us an opioid
  epidemic and health insurance bankruptcies.
  With his loathing of American empire,
  Greene would be unsurprised to fi nd Big
  Pharma circling. Yet at fi rst, his villain sprang
  from closer to home. In Greene’s original
  novella, Lime and Martins were British subjects,
  pals from private school. Harry’s crimes in
  Vienna are, we discover, those of a charismatic
  English scoundrel educated to rig the system.
  Indeed. It would be interesting to know
  what the current prime minister makes of
  Harry Lime – a habitual liar, an amply scaled
  betrayer of women, a nihilist and narcissist
  bulldozing through life with a bone-deep
  conviction that, as the novella puts it, “ his
  happiness will make the world’s day”. Greene
  knew the type. He knew the poison in our
  golf clubs and members’ bars. The spivs and
  grotesques now running the country might
  have stepped whole from his pages, whipping
  up nationalism while discreetly betting against
  the pound and arranging second passports.
  High on the ferris wheel , Harry prices up the
  tiny lives below. “Would you really feel any pity
  if one of those dots stopped moving?” Now, the
  maths of no deal are only deranged if you value
  those dots above your investment fund. And we


• car-factory workers, sheep farmers, research
  scientists, even fi lm critics – wander below.
  How does it end? In 1949, American interests
  won the day: Greene was overruled by Selznick
  as to how to close the story. For anyone who
  has never seen this cruelly brilliant fi lm and
  wonders what it says about the road ahead,
  here is the spoiler warning. There is a funeral,
  a long solitary walk and then a fade to black.
  The Third Man screens at BFI Southbank until
  12 September and nationwide for one day only
  on 29 September, and is released on DVD and
  Blu-Ray later in the year.

The Third

Man’s no-

deal vision

J arvis Cocker has

packed a lot into his 55 years. For

26 of them he fronted Pulp, who

created one of the genuinely era-

defi ning songs of the 1990s with

Common People. He made seven

albums with Pulp, has made two

solo albums and written songs

for the likes of Marianne Faithfull

and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Other

extra-curricular activities range

from appearing on Question Time

to starring in Harry Potter and the

Goblet of Fire. But it’s not enough.

“My output isn’t as much as I

would have hoped,” he says, softly.

“I’ve always felt that.”

We are in a small, darkened

dressing room in Leith theatre,

Edinburgh, where Cocker – outsize

glasses, double corduroy and

Yorkshire Tea – is adding another

string to his bow fronting Jarv Is, the

fi rst new band he has formed since

starting Arabicus Pulp in 1978 at

school in Sheffi eld.

From 2010 until 2017, Cocker was

a BBC 6Music DJ. He loved being able

to infl ict on the public the peculiar

records from his basement that he

normally played only to himself or

friends. A new compilation – Music

from Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday Service

• brings some of them together.
  Sheffi eld electronic pioneers Cabaret
  Voltaire nestle alongside 1960s Leeds
  singer-songwriter Jake Thackray.
  Antony and the Johnsons’ haunting
  version of Beyoncé’s Crazy in Love
  appears alongside a Trinidadian steel
  band’s strangely mesmeric remake of
  Gary Numan’s Cars.
  “I half-jokingly said I wanted to
  bring the boredom back to Sunday
  afternoons,” he chuckles, but notes
  that he is old enough to remember
  when Sunday afternoons were
  boring and “you had to make your
  own entertainment, and really think

about it”. So, he played “the sort of

records that you’d never hear on the

radio or anywhere really. Mellow

music and spoken-word stuff people

could let fl ow through their mind.”

The problem was, he kept feeling

an urge to make more music.

“I’d hesitate to describe it as a

calling or whatever,” he says, “But at

the back of my mind I felt like I was

moonlighting from what I should

be doing.” So, in 2017, he pulled the

plug on his DJing.

First, he made an album with

Canadian pianist Chilly Gonzales and

worked on solo songs on a computer,

but it wasn’t happening until he

realised it was “blindingly obvious

that having been in bands since I

was 14, I needed to work with other

people, get everybody in a room and

say: ‘This is how it goes. Join in.’”

Ironically, the Sunday Service

led partly to the forming of Jarv

Is. Cocker was diligently rooting

through CDs to play on the radio

when he came across one by harpist

Serafi na Steer. He really liked it,

went to see her, produced an album

for her and now she is in his band.

Steer recommended her bandmate

Emma Smith (violin) and before he

knew it, Jarv Is were a six-piece.

Cocker says the Jarv Is songs

• which have been going down a
  storm at festivals – are diff erent to
  Pulp’s. “In the past, there was a fi rm
  narrative,” he says, perhaps thinking
  of Common People’s tale of a rich
  girl slumming it or Sorted for E’s and

‘ I’m totally o

Back with a new

band, Jarvis

Cocker talks to

Dave Simpson

about the death of

politics – and his

enduring belief in

common people

The perfect

recording of

the perfect

pop song is

still my

holy grail

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