“Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t. Why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat. I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It’s the same thing. They have their five year plans, and so have I.”
Orson Welles’ mysterious Harry Lime lurks over this classic film set in post-World War II Vienna. When Lime’s friend Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) arrives in the war wracked city, he enters immediately into the chaos of the war’s aftermath. Lime, who was to meet him, is dead. Martins’ investigation into the car accident that supposedly claimed his friend’s life turns up more questions than it answers. The deeper he digs, the darker and more dangerous his quest becomes. By the time he discovers that Lime is, in fact, still alive he already knows that his friend has spent innocent lives for his personal gain and he is deeply involved in a city that has been turned upside down by bombing and post-war occupation. The regulations and price controls are so endemic that essentially everyone is in the black market. In fact, the black market is the market. Though one so massively hampered that the people are reduced mostly to barter.
The libertarian virtue of this film is the unmasking of the State and its wars. Harry Lime, as a heart-rending visit with his victims shows, is evil for the way he uses people and spends lives for his own gain. But he is only doing what the State does on a smaller scale. At the top of a ferris wheel, with the perspective of a bomber he says to Martins, “Look down there. Would you feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you 20,000 pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep the money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spend?”
Lime’s perspective is the lofty, heartless perspective of the State at war. Like the State and its apologists, he sees nobility only in conflict and makes fun of peaceful bourgeois accomplishments, “In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed. But they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.”
We can see that Harry Lime’s actions are evil, why are the same actions taken by the State so much harder to see for what they are?
[See more reviews at the Mises.org Films on Liberty page]
