#39: The Third Man (1949)
Starring: Joseph Cotton, Alida Valli, Orson Welles
Directed by: Carol Reed
Plot Arriving in Vienna, Holly Martins learns that his friend Harry Lime, who has invited him, recently died in a car accident.
But is it any good?
Oh my god, yes! Shame on me for not having seen it earlier, considering I’m such an ardent fan of Citizen Kane. It makes me wonder why The Third Man isn’t more well-known? It’s clearly popular, ranking this high in imdb’s list, but from his bios anyone would think Kane, Touch of Evil and The Magnificent Ambersons were all Orson Welles had achieved.
The Third Man has all the suspense you’d expect from a Graham Greene story. Set against the rubbled backdrop of post WW2 Vienna, it’s far more than a simple whodunnit, though that’s how it begins. It addresses two-faced behaviour, lost love, greed and racketeering. Long shadows are cast against lamp-lit walls, shots are angled to create a sense of disorientation, the police chase their night-time nemeses through the rubble as bedraggled men sell balloons and a chubby little boy gleefully points out a suspected killer.
A fair bit of the dialogue is in Austrian German and not subtitled, which is probably intended to give the audience the same feeling of isolation as it gives the main character (since I apeak German, I knew what was being said, although you can figure out the gist from the context anyway).
The characters are all a little lost in a city still brushing itself off from the horror of just a few years earlier. It’s a city of shadows, really, and the film’s ending, while not tied up in a neat little bow, is one of the best endings I’ve seen.
IMDb’s rating: 8.5/10
My rating: 9/10
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Sunday, April 20th, 2008 at 9:35 pm under
