The Third Man (1949)

(M) ★★★★★

Director: Carol Reed.

Cast: Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard, Paul Hörbiger, Ernst Deutsch, Erich Ponto, Siegfried Breuer, Hedwig Bleibtreu, Bernard Lee, Wilfrid Hyde-White.

"I knew I should've turned left at Albuquerque."

Here's what I remember from my first viewing of The Third Man 20 years ago - the sewer chase finale, a stray light illuminating Harry Lime's face, the ferris wheel, and the cuckoo clock speech. Each of these moments features that titan of cinema, Orson Welles.

Rewatching Reed's classic noir, it's surprising how little screen time Welles has, but these remembrances illustrate how much he towers over the film. In less than 10 minutes he dominates proceedings enough to earn his sociopathic Lime spot #37 on the American Film Institute's list of cinema's greatest villains of all time. 

Obviously Welles is a major part of what makes The Third Man such a classic, not only of film noir, but of all film. Lime looms over the narrative just as the shadow of World War II looms over post-war Vienna in the film. If we'd finally met Lime after such a build up and he'd been anything less than Wellesian in his charismatic proportions, it would have undone so much great work. Welles fan and director Peter Bogdanovich also notes Welles' influence on Reed's direction, noting that "the look of The Third Man - and, in fact, the whole film - would be unthinkable without Citizen Kane, The Stranger and The Lady from Shanghai, all of which Orson made in the '40s, and all of which preceded The Third Man". And Welles wrote that pitch perfect cuckoo clock speech.

Of course, there is so much more to The Third Man than Welles - he's the slice of Lime in a gin and tonic, tying it all together, making it all work. To stretch this desperate metaphor to breaking point, the gin is Graham Greene's gripping noir storyline and Reed's use of German expressionism in his direction, while the tonic is the under-rated Cotten in a workmanlike performance, carrying the whole thing along.

Greene hung out in Vienna just three years after WWII ended, picking up stories of the black market and life in the city for his screenplay. Filming there adds so much veracity to Greene's story - the moral decay of Lime and his dubious cohorts is reflected in the destruction of the city. Where once stood beauty and some of humanity's finest achievements now lies rubble and ruin.

Reed, Aussie cinematographer Robert Krasker, and assistant director Guy Hamilton (who did four Bond films) use light and shadow brilliantly to ramp up the noirish tones, throwing in some ambitious-for-the-time Dutch angles to keep the viewer off kilter (The Best Years Of Our Lives director William Wyler famously sent his friend Reed a spirit level in response). These tasty tricks help put you in the shoes of Cotten's equally perplexed Holly Martins, the pulp western writer scrambling to find out what happened to his mate Harry. Cotten did some of his best work alongside his dear pal Welles, and this is among his finest. He makes Martins' an enchanting mix of brash American, clueless everyman, and desperate friend, and by film's end we feel his sense of betrayal and sadness.

Alida Valli and Trevor Howard are also great, as is Bernard Lee and indeed the remainder of the cast, who get to throw some neat gags in to break up the darkness. And when you add Anton Karas' jaunty yet haunting zither score, it rounds off a classic film without a weak spot.

The Third Man has earnt its rightful place as a British classic, though it's almost perceived to done this by accident. As Film Magazine noted while putting the movie at #26 on its 100 Greatest list, Reed "had to settle for Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles" instead of getting James Stewart and Noel Coward. Leslie Halliwell, writing in 1977, called its success "a lucky combination", while Barry Norman, in the process of dubbing it one of the 100 greatest films of all time in 1998, said that "on the face of it The Third Man should simply have come and gone, remembered - if at all - as simply another post-war thriller".

The director was also fighting with Greene over the ending - the writer wanted Holly and Anna to get together, but Reed disagreed. As Greene noted much later, Reed "has been proved triumphantly right", giving us one of the greatest downer finales in cinema, and capping off one of the best films of any generation. As William Bayer put it in his 1973 book The Great Movies, "The Third Man is a flawless film of intrigue and suspense, a summit of perfection within the genre... (it) may be the greatest (British) film since World War II". Bayer was correct nearly 50 years ago, and is still correct today.