Probably no more than a thousand American movies examine, mostly without meaning to, our national preoccupation with, and devotion to, our own innocence. When generalizing about ourselves, we have no great investment in the notion of our sophistication, or even our competence. (Though we’d like to believe that we’re mostly competent.) We’re absolutely unyielding, though, on the subject of our good intentions. Sure, we’ve been willing to admit mistakes—at least before our current administration—as long as everyone understood that we meant well. OK, we concede, we bollox up the occasional intervention, but why? Only because we were trying to help.

And what’s better evidence of that, we like to point out, than our attempt to get Europe back on its feet after World War II? Weren’t we right there, wallets open and hands out, ready to help Gunther and Pierre and Guido out of the rubble almost before the shooting stopped? And did we ask anything in return, besides a little cooperation and maybe some gratitude?

Well, yeah, some European movies, like Carol Reed’s The Third Man, suggest. We did. We do. Even if some of our hearts were occasionally in the right place.

Now, I’m one of those people who thinks that there’s never a bad time to see The Third Man. It is, after all, about as nifty and stylish and endlessly pleasing as thrillers get. But here we are again, in early 2005, post-inauguration, looking forward to four more years of disaster due to our refusal to see through a brazenly transparent rogues’ gallery. And The Third Man offers us a by no means entirely unsympathetic, but nevertheless bracingly clear-eyed, European take on an American type germane to that rogues’ gallery, a type broken into its constituent halves.The movie offers us two old friends, Joseph Cotten’s Holly Martins and Orson Welles’s Harry Lime, both abroad in postwar Vienna. Holly and Harry, each the dark side of the other, both wreaking havoc, one obliviously, with an outraged sense of his own virtue, and the other cynically, with a blithely and sinisterly overdeveloped sense of his own self-interest. And if that sounds familiar to those of you following our current geopolitical situation, it should.

In 1948, producer Alexander Korda sent novelist and screenwriter Graham Greene to Vienna to research a movie about its post-war occupation. At that point, the four powers had divvied it up into zones: American, Russian, British, and French. Everyone was trying to help; everyone was angling for their piece of the pie. It was open season, as far as creative entrepreneurship went. It was an Allied Tower of Babel. It took Greene only two months to deliver...