THE THIRD MAN Movie Review

1949 Carol Reed

In The Immortal Battalion, director Carol Reed praises the patriotic spirit that united England and other countries against the evils of fascism. In The Third Man, he takes a cool look at the fruits of that victory and finds a moral landscape as treacherous as the bombed-out rubble of Vienna. The film is justly famous as an intelligent thriller, precursor to the American films noir that would follow in the 1950s. In its understanding of post-war Europe, it's also a companion piece to Judgment at Nuremberg and The Victors—a film about hard choices between loyalty and conscience.

Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), hack writer of popular western novels, comes to Vienna at the invitation of his childhood friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles). Harry has promised Holly some sort of job in this “closed” city that's clumsily governed by military forces from France, England, America, and the Soviet Union. The first thing that Holly learns is that he's a day late; his friend was killed in an automobile accident. If he hurries, he can still make the funeral. That's where he is spotted by Maj. Calloway (Trevor Howard), a British security officer who tells an unbelieving Holly that his friend was involved in the black market. Harry didn't just dabble. “He was about the worst racketeer that ever made a dirty living in this city,” Calloway says. Holly is insulted but his naive curiosity is aroused and he decides to learn more about Harry. Part of his motivation is sexual. He's attracted to Harry's old girlfriend Anna (Alida Valli). The more he learns, the less sense Harry's death makes and he's soon certain that it was a murder.

That's the first of Holly's mistakes. As the plot twists itself into tighter and tighter contortions, Holly makes one blunder after another. In this case, though, the story is no more important than the style in which it is told. Reed and cinematographer Robert Krasker fill the screen with canted “Dutch” angles, heavy shadows, and menace that appears in the most innocent forms. A child playing with a ball becomes an ominous figure at one of the major turning points. And all of the action is played out to the accompaniment of Anton Karas's famous zither score. The city itself, partially destroyed and dominated by the giant Ferris wheel, is as important as the human characters. An extended sequence in the middle begins with a wild taxi ride through dark streets, then turns into a foot chase, and finally becomes a descent into a rubble-strewn hell. The concluding chase through the sewers is one of the most famous sequences in the history of film, and it's still the best of its kind, with images taken straight from a dream and put on the screen.

With so much else going on, it's easy to forget the central ideas that Reed and writer Graham Greene are working with. Holly is an archetypal innocent who fundamentally misunderstands Europe and the changes that the war has caused. In one of his first scenes, he walks blithely under a ladder. Throughout the film he and the other characters get names wrong and often cannot understand what Austrian speakers are saying without translation. The famous and absolutely perfect final shot underscores how little Holly has learned. Fascism may have been defeated, but the old divisions have not been closed.

That view of post-war Europe certainly is bleak, but bleakness has never been presented in such striking, indelible images. The Third Man is one of the all-time greats, and in some ways, it is even better on video than it is on the big screen. The American theatrical release is 93 minutes long. The tape was made from the longer 100-minute European version with Carol Reed's voice-over narration.

Cast: Joseph Cotten (Holly Martins), Orson Welles (Harry Lime), Alida Valli (Anna Schmidt), Trevor Howard (Maj. Calloway), Bernard Lee (Sgt. Paine), Wilfrid Hyde-White (Crabbin), Ernst Deutsch (Baron Kurtz), Erich Ponto (Dr. Winkel), Siegfried Breuer (Popescu), Hedwig Bleibtreu (Old woman), Paul Hoerbiger (Porter), Herbert Halbik (Hansel), Frederick Schreicker (Hansel's father), Jenny Werner (Winkel's maid), Nelly Arno (Kurtz's mother), Alexis Chesnakov (Brodsky), Leo Bieber (Barman), Paul Hardtmuth (Hall Porter), Geoffrey Keen (British policeman), Annie Rosar (Porter's wife); Written by: Graham Greene; Cinematography by: Robert Krasker; Music by: Anton Karas. Producer: British Lion, Selznick Pictures, Alexander Korda, Carol Reed, David O. Selznick. British. Awards: Academy Awards '50: Best Black and White Cinematography; British Academy Awards '49: Best Film; Cannes Film Festival '49: Best Film; Directors Guild of America Awards '49: Best Director (Reed); American Film Institute (AFI) '98: Top 100; Nominations: Academy Awards '50: Best Director (Reed), Best Film Editing. Running Time: 104 minutes. Format: VHS, Beta, LV, 8mm.