Orson Welles’ Iconic 1949 film “The Third Man” gets a 4K remake to celebrate the actor's 100th birthday - Stephan Jukic – May 8, 2015 Leading up to the centennial of the birth of the iconic film director Orson Welles, one of his finest and most famous movies (aside from, you know, Citizen Kane) will be getting a complete 4K ultra HD restoration and heading right back into movie theaters in several key U.S cities as well as the Cannes Film Festival. The remastered version of director Carol Reed’s 1949 detective noir stars Welles as a black market trader playing his part in an increasingly tangled and confused maze of deception, betrayal and murder in the mysterious atmosphere of Vienna, Austria right after the Allied occupation at the end of World War 2. The movie plot was written by renowned thriller author Graham Greene, who also published a novella version with the same name in the wake of the movie’s success.

The film tells the story of hack writer (played by actor Joseph Cotton), who travels to Allied-occupied Vienna in an attempt to follow up on a job offer from a childhood friend who is played by Orson Welles. However, once Cotton’s character arrives in Vienna, he quickly becomes entangled in a web of murder and deception that revolves partly around the Welles character. The film will be premiering at the Cannes Film Festival later in May and will then go on to open in New York on June 26th, Los Angeles on July 3d and other U.S cities at the same time or shortly afterwards. And for those who haven’t yet seen any of “The Third Man”, here is the original 1950 movie trailer, courtesy of YouTube… NYC-based film distributor Rialto Pictures announced the news this Wednesday the 6th of May, the day of Orson Welles’ 100th birthday. “The Third Man” was widely regarded as one of the finest movies of all time and was both a critical and commercial hit during its time, going on to win the Palme D’Or at Cannes and an Academy Award for the highly expressive black and white cinematography.

The 4K resolution restoration was carried out by the company Deluxe on behalf of StudioCanal and is possible because most older films were produced on reels whose maximum resolution when digitized goes well beyond the scope of even 4K ultra HD resolution. In fact, the film could likely even be scaled up to a digital resolution of 8K if it were possible to widely screen in theaters today. The Third Man | Film Review | Slant Magazine by Matt Noller December 16, 2008 Of all the iconic images in Carol Reed's The Third Man, none is as recognizable as the sight of Harry Lime (Orson Welles) standing in a Vienna doorway, bathed in shadow. Accompanied by Anton Karas's unforgettable zither score, it's one of the most iconic entrances in film history, which is befitting one of film's most iconic characters. Although he's only on screen for a fraction of the film's running time, Lime stands out as one of the screen's most chilling embodiments of the banality of evil, and a perfect stand-in for Third Man's vision of moral breakdown in post-WWII Europe.

When pulp novelist Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) arrives in Vienna, it's with the intention of staying with Lime, a longtime friend. Upon his arrival, however, Martin learns of Lime's death after being struck by a taxi. Martins attends Lime's funeral and meets Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli), who had been in love with Lime. He also meets Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), who informs Martins of Lime's shady black-market dealings (selling diluted quantities of penicillin to sick people, leading to cases of madness and death). While investigating Lime's death, Martins comes to the conclusion that Lime was not killed in an accident but was murdered by his criminal associates and sets out to find proof of his theory, discovering in the process that Lime was not killed at all. It examines a modern post-war environment where people’s lives are treated as nothing more than a means to financial success. The scene in which Martins confronts Lime in an amusement park is one of the greatest in cinema history.

Lime launches into a stunning monologue on the necessity of violence in the world (“In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and 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 that produce? The cuckoo clock”). Rumor has it that Welles, rather than screenwriter Graham Greene, was responsible for the monologue, but its architect hardly matters; in the hands of Welles (in perhaps his finest screen performance) and Reed, who stages it on a Ferris wheel spinning high above the ground, it plays as nothing less than a battle of good versus evil fought while mankind passes oblivious below. “Look down there,” Lime tells Martins. “Tell me. Would you really 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 tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?” That's the question that motivates Third Man, which, like many of the era's seminal noirs, examines a modern post-war environment where people's lives are treated as nothing more than a means to financial success (see also Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity , the murder plot of which literally boils a man's life down to a dollar amount). By utilizing the German-inspired visual techniques of wide shots, canted angles, jagged architecture, and expressionistic chiaroscuro lighting, directors like Reed and Wilder created an environment of spatial and moral confusion in which their pulpy narratives could take on the ethical weight of a bibilical proverb. As Lime attempts to escape from the police in the sewers of Vienna, he grasps helplessly up through a sewer grate at a light he can't reach, and the effect is that of the wicked being denied entrance into heaven. And in the film, such an image isn't even remotely silly; it's pure, devastating and vital, just as much now as it was then.

Buy The Third Man (1949) - Full Cast & Crew - IMDb The Third Man (1949) Create a character page for: Create » focus puller: second unit (uncredited) Costume and Wardrobe Department music played by: Zither music Other crew a list of 32 titles created 12 Jun 2013 a list of 49 titles created 02 Jul 2013 a list of 46 titles created 06 Jun 2014 a list of 31 titles created 20 Jul 2014 a list of 48 titles created 18 Jan 2016 IMDb Everywhere Find showtimes, watch trailers, browse photos, track your Watchlist and rate your favorite movies and TV shows on your phone or tablet! The Third Man (1949) Pages: ( 1 ) ( 2 ) ( 3 ) Background The Third Man (1949) is a visually-stylish thriller - a paranoid story of social, economic, and moral corruption in a depressed, rotting and crumbling, 20th century Vienna following World War II.

The striking film-noirish, shadowy thriller was filmed expressionistically within the decadent, shattered and poisoned city that has been sector-divided along geo-political lines. The black and white, pessimistic film is one of the greatest British thrillers of the post-war era, in the best Alfred Hitchcock tradition, and beautifully produced and directed by Britisher Carol Reed. It was voted the #1 British Film of the 20th Century by the esteemed British Film Institute (BFI). It was co-produced by Hungarian-born Alexander Korda and American movie mogul David O. Selznick. Because Korda gave American distribution rights to Selznick (who cut eleven minutes from the original British version), the credits of the US version include Selznick references. This was Reed's second collaboration with British screenwriter-author Graham Greene (after The Fallen Idol (1948)). It was based on Greene's novella of the same name, written solely to be a source text for the film screenplay and never intended to be read or published.

It was a clever and original mystery tale simply evoked by one sentence written by Greene: "I saw a man walking down the Strand, whose funeral I had only recently attended." It told of a love triangle with nightmarish suspense, treachery, betrayal, guilt and disillusionment. Its two most famous sequences include the Ferris-wheel showdown high atop a deserted fairground with the famous cuckoo clock speech (written by Orson Welles), and the climactic chase through the underground network of sewers beneath the cobblestone streets. In defiance of US producer Selznick, Reed boldly refused to cast Noel Coward in the Harry Lime role (played ultimately by Orson Welles), insisted on a downbeat ending and demanded that it be shot on-location in expressionistic, documentary-style. [Cary Grant and James Stewart were also considered for the role of naive novelist Holly Martins (named Rollo Martin originally), ultimately played by Welles' Mercury Theatre actor and Citizen Kane (1941) co-star Joseph Cotten.] The director knew that the film's musical score could not be reflective of the traditional Old Vienna - waltz music by Strauss. Instead, it would be provided by a solo instrument -- a zither.

The jaunty but haunting musical score by Viennese composer/performer Anton Karas lingers long after the film's viewing with its twangy, mermerizing, lamenting, disconcerting (and sometimes irritating) hurdy-gurdy tones. In fact, Karas' musical instrument was a leading film character and advertised as such: "He'll have you in a dither with his zither (a laptop string instrument)." The insistent, chilling music sets a mood of polarized dislocations in the world (e.g., war and play, men and children) and in the corrupted city's 'no-man's-land' environment (with its bombed out, war-torn ruins, dark and slick streets, cemeteries and sewers criss-crossing beneath the sectored zones). Surprisingly, it was nominated for only three Academy Awards in 1950, including Best Director, and Best Film Editing. Its sole Oscar was for Robert Krasker's vivid, atmospheric, moody black/white cinematography (although the final long cemetery walk scene was actually shot by uncredited German cameraman Hans Schneeberger).

Unusually reckless, canted camera angles (one of their earliest uses), and wide-angle lens distortions amidst the atmospheric on-location views of a shadowy Vienna cast a somber mood over the fable of post-war moral ambiguity and ambivalent redemption. The deliberately unsettling, tilted angles reflected the state of the ruined, fractured and dark city, filled with black marketeers, spies, refugees, thieves, and foreign powers seeking control. [This was one of the first British films shot almost entirely on location.

Others include writer/director Michael Powell's The Edge of the World (1937) and Powell's and Emeric Pressburger's The 49th Parallel (1941) (aka The Invaders).] And the film once again teamed co-stars Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles of Citizen Kane (1941) , in a tale of a foolishly-romantic, wimpy American writer (Holly Martins) of pulp westerns in occupied, post-WWII Vienna who tries to understand (and then decipher) the mysterious disappearance - vehicular accidental death and burial of an old school friend (Harry Lime) - who, unbeknownst to him, had become an exploitative, morally corrupt, and chilling black-market drug dealer and racketeer (of diluted penicillin), working out of the Russian zone.

[From 1951-52, Welles starred in a spin-off radio show titled The Lives of Harry Lime, a syndicated 52 episode series based on the adventures of his character in this film.] Anglo-Austrian director Frederick Baker created a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the making of the film, including interviews, with the documentary essay Shadowing the Third Man (2004). This deconstruction of the film revisited various locales of the original film and compared them to the present-day restored Vienna. It also provided an account of the battles between co-producers Alexander Korda and David O. Selznick, and between scriptwriter Greene and Selznick.

In the documentary, Greene admitted for the first time: "Carol Reed was right he made a magnificent ending." The Story The credits of the complex masterpiece appear over a huge close-up of the vibrating strings of a zither, playing "The Harry Lime Theme" or "The Third Man Theme." While various documentary-style shots of post-war, divided, fragmented and occupied Vienna (a 'frontier' city dividing East and West - and governed by four Allied forces) are surveyed, an anonymous voice-over (from director Carol Reed) delivers a first-person prologue in the original UK version - suggesting that he had black market connections. [The lines only found in the UK version are in red.] [Joseph Cotten delivered the narration in the American release, delivering his own story - the lines in blue are only in the US version.] I never knew the old Vienna before the war, with its Strauss music, its glamour and [its] easy charm - Constantinople suited me better. I really got to know it in the classic period of the Black Market.

[Boots, stockings, cigarettes, and watches exchange hands.] [They could get anything if people wanted it enough and had the money to pay.] We'd run anything, if people wanted it enough- mmm - had the money to pay. Of course, a [the] situation like that does tempt amateurs, but [of course, they don't last long, not really, not like professionals] you know they can't stay the course like a professional. [A view of a dead body floating in an icy river.] Now the city - [A sign announces: "ENTERING THE AMERICAN ZONE."] it's [is] divided into four zones, you know, each occupied by a power - [Views of signs of the British, Russian, and French zones.] the American, the British, the Russian, and the French. But the center of the city - that's international, policed by an International Patrol, [A view of guard's duty being changed.] one member of each of the four powers. Wonderful.

[You can imagine what a chance they had], What a hope they had, all of them strangers to the place and none [no two] of them could speak [speaking] the same language, except a sort of smattering of German. [Four guards in a jeep each represent their nationalities.] [Oh, they were] Good fellows on the whole, did their best, you know. [Views of bombed-out sites around Vienna.] Vienna doesn't really look any worse than a lot of other European cities, bombed about a bit [a little, of course]. [Views of soldiers on guard, and then standing on parade and marching in a square.] Oh, I was gonna tell you, wait, I was gonna tell you about Holly Martins, an American. Came all the way here to visit a friend of his. The name is Lime, Harry Lime. Now Martins was broke and Lime had offered him some sort - I don't know - some sort of a job. Anyway, there he was, poor chap, happy as a lark and without a cent. [Anyway, I was dead broke when I got to Vienna.

A close pal of mine had wired me, offering me a job doing publicity work for some kind of charity he was running. I'm a writer, name's Martins, Holly Martins. Anyway, down I came, all the way to old Vienna, happy as a lark and without a dime.] An American, Western pulp novelist/writer of juvenile Western pulp stories (Zane Grey-style), Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) [a frivolous first name to define the nature of his character] arrives at the railway station in post-war ravaged Vienna - still under Allied occupation and overrun with black markets. A youthful, sappy counterpart to the film's dark, con-artist counterpart, Harry Lime (Orson Welles), Holly is there to seek out his boyhood friend who had vaguely offered him a job (and sent him an airplane ticket), inviting him there to stay with him and author/write propaganda for a volunteer medical unit he runs. As his passport is checked by a British MP, he asks about Lime. He tells the customs official he's going to stay with a friend at 15 Stiftgasse.

The zither music dips, signifying that something is awry concerning the absence of Harry: Lime, Harry Lime....I thought he'd be here to meet me. Beginning his long, questioning search for Harry Lime, Holly makes his way to Stiftgasse 15, the location of Harry's second floor apartment, inauspiciously walking under a ladder leaning against the front of the residence. The building's architecture includes pseudo-Greek statuary, a facade of Vienna's past glory, now a city filled with corruption. [Goof: Note that the house number is 5 over the entrance to Harry Lime's apartment, not 15.] He is immediately shocked to learn from the German-speaking caretaker/Porter (Paul Hoerbiger), who is replacing a burnt-out light bulb, [a symbolic gesture of the repair of Europe], that Harry was recently killed on Thursday in a street accident - he was run over by a truck as he stepped from the sidewalk, and his coffin was taken ten minutes earlier to the cemetery: An accident, knocked over by a car in front of the house, have seen it myself, killed at once, immediately. Already in hell [pointing up mistakenly] or in heaven [pointing down mistakenly].

Sorry for the grave diggers. Hard work. It is frost. [The film both begins and ends with a funeral sequence and the burial of the same person.] Holly hurriedly rushes to the gravesite in the cemetery to attend Harry's funeral. As he approaches, he inquires about the cryptic ceremony, and is told by a distant onlooker (later identified as Major Calloway): "A fellow called Lime." A priest is saying prayers in German at the gravesite as Martins arrives - there are only a few stoic-faced onlookers and one beautiful woman. [Later, we learn it is Harry's Czech grieving mistress/girlfriend Anna Schmidt, a Russian exile and refugee.] After the ceremony, Martins is given a ride to town by cynical British military police officer Major Calloway (Trevor Howard). As they ride down the main road, Calloway notices the attractive dark-haired woman who was at the graveside walking towards the city. He follows her receding figure while looking out the car's back window.

Calloway offers to buy Holly a drink and the scene dissolves to the inside of a bar, where Martins reminisces about his old chum whom he last saw in September 1939 - his thoughts suggest a latent homosexual attraction: Holly: I guess nobody knew Harry like he did, like I did...back in school. I was never so lonesome in my life till he showed up...Best friend I ever had. Calloway: That sounds like a cheap novelette. Holly: I write cheap novelettes. Calloway: I'm afraid I've never heard of you. What's your name again? Holly: Holly Martins. Orson Welles' Subversive Genius: 'The Third Man', Film Noir and the Cold War | PopMatters 'The Third Man', Film Noir and the Cold War by Jonah Raskin Could it be that Orson Welles was directing the films he was acting in even when he wasn't officially "directing" them?

Orson Welles as Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949) By the time that I began to screen The Third Man (1949) for college students in 1990, Orson Welles (1915-1985) was already a largely forgotten director and film noir — one of the genres at which he excelled — was a kind of cinematic curiosity in popular American culture. Such are the vicissitudes of fame, perhaps especially in Hollywood where stars rise and fall and disappear. By the ‘90s Welles was underground and the undergraduates I taught didn’t understand what made him tick or the motives behind his movies, including Citizen Kane (1941) and Lady from Shanghai (1947), in which he plays the fall guy and his estranged wife, Rita Hayworth, plays the femme fatale. If they didn’t get Kane and Lady, they also didn’t get Touch of Evil (1958) in which Welles plays a bloated policeman who straddles the border between the US and Mexico and treats that no-mans land as his own private backyard.

In the movies that he made in the ‘40s and ‘50s, Welles specialized in borders and in evil — and more than just a touch of it. Evil practically oozed off the screen and into the aisles. The characters he played — whether the newspaper mogul, Kane, in Citizen Kane, the white-collar gangster, Harry Lime, in The Third Man, or the seedy cop, Hank Quinlan, in A Touch of Evil — are all immensely evil. Yet they also have a sense of innocence and vulnerability about them. First and foremost they’re Americans who have gone astray, growing from playful youngsters to adult monsters that have gotten out of control. From Lime’s point of view, good people and ordinary citizens are fools to be squished like mosquitoes. “In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance,” Lime says in one of the film’s most dramatic scenes which takes place at the Vienna Ferris Wheel — the Wiener Riesenrad. He adds, “In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce?

The cuckoo clock.” Those lines aren’t in the screenplay. Welles added them on the set and on the spur of the moment and thereby injected verve into the character of Harry Lime, a flesh-and-blood creature of the Cold War. Of course, the cynical, manipulative characters that Welles plays in Citizen Kane, The Third Man, and A Touch of Evil don’t survive their own searing ordeals. They certainly don’t live happily ever after; by the end of each picture they’re undone by their own machinations, caught up in the webs of intrigue they spin. On his deathbed, Kane misses the freedom of lost boyhood. Quinlan feels sentimental about the intimate evenings he spent in the company of the wry, seductive Tanya, played superbly by Marlene Dietrich. Quinlan and Kane and Lime all have a past that they’re running from and yet are unable to escape. Like the figures in Shakespearean tragedy — like Lear, Hamlet and Macbeth — they’re the authors of their own fate and their own fall. Terrible and terrifying, they teach us to love to hate them as they go down from high and mighty places.

Throughout the ‘40s and well into the ‘50s, Welles disturbed viewers by getting under their skin and poking away at psychological wounds until they were in emotional pain, sometimes laughing (appropriately) at the same time. Tragedy and comedy clash and co-exist. For Welles, every scene mattered. Every gesture counted; nothing extraneous figured in the unformulaic cinematic forms he shaped and reshaped. Teaching film noir, The Third Man looked to me to be among the most accessible of his pictures, though The Lady from Shanghai wasn’t far behind in my scheme of things. Both are fairly short and compact, without the epic sweep of Citizen Kane. Both are in black-and-white and both of them offer love stories without wedding bells at the end. In The Lady from Shanghai, Michael O’Hara (Welles), the main character — a sailor — as well as the narrator who provides the voiceovers outwits and outlasts the shark-like humans who try to destroy him. The innocent fish in a sea of evil, O’Hara escapes the traps set for him and remains a free man. In The Third Man, evil taints everyone and everything.

No one is really free of it, except perhaps the heroine who walks alone and keeps her own company. Welles did not, of course, direct the picture, though when I first saw it in the ‘50s on late night TV I assumed he had. It seemed so much like Welles — over-sized, ironic, and capricious with visual puns and jokes, odd camera angles, and stark lighting that creates an ominous atmosphere. The British filmmaker, Carol Reed, directed it and was awarded a knighthood three years later, becoming Sir Reed. Reed had real talent and made several superb movies including Odd Man Out (1947), The Fallen Idol (1948), which was based on a Graham Greene short story, and Outcast of the Islands (1951), inspired by Joseph Conrad’s novel of the same name. Reed was a hot director in the 1940s. Greene was a hot writer and provided a well-crafted screenplay for The Third Man, though significant changes were made on the set. Welles was just as hot as they; his influence on Carol is felt from the beginning to the end of The Third Man.

The American director and actor, Peter Bogdanovich, noted, in the introduction to the DVD version, “that the look of The Third Man— and, in fact, the whole film—would be unthinkable without Citizen Kane, The Stranger, and The Lady of Shanghai, all of which Orson made in the 40s, and all of which preceded The Third Man.” Having Welles in front of the camera influenced what went on behind the camera and in the editing room, too. In The Third Man, Welles plays to perfection the part of Harry Lime, the American black marketer against the backdrop of seedy Vienna in the aftermath of World War II — a border city divided between the Russians, the British, and the Americans. Crossing back and forth covertly from East to West, from the communist controlled zone to the territory under the supervision of the “free world”, Lime doesn’t make an appearance until the film is well under way and at first only as the shadow of a man. Out of sight and out of reach — an invisible, intangible and yet intense force — he haunts the picture, the other characters, and the audience, too.

When he’s in front of the camera, he fills the whole screen; paradoxically, his lengthy absences add power to his presence when he appears from out of the shadows of the city. Less is more, Welles showed lavish Hollywood producers. Alida Valli performs brilliantly in the part of Lime’s sad, lonely, loyal lover, Anna Schmidt. Joseph Cotton’s acting in the role of Lime’s buddy, Holly Martins, helps immensely, too, in part because he and Welles had collaborated on Citizen Kane. Martins’s divided feelings for Lime add a layer of psychological depth to the picture. In a way, Lime (and Welles) play a kind of cat-and-mouse game with the motion-picture camera and with Martins, the goofy, amateur sleuth — and writer of pulp westerns — who searches for his missing friend, finds him, loses him, finds him again, and loses his naivete, or so one hopes. A classic about lost illusions, The Third Man gave the cold, heartless Cold War a memorable name and an unforgettable face — the face and the name of Harry Lime who would sell his own mother, his own country, and his own soul.

A movie about a time and a place as well as a movie about a man rotten to the core, it didn’t translate well to students in the ‘90s when the Cold War seemed to be a relic of history and when divided cities such as Vienna were footnotes in textbooks. Maybe the film is far too rooted in a specific albeit pivotal moment in the 20th century; maybe it is indeed dated, but it’s also a timeless work of art, as British film critic David Thomson — who is often stingy with accolades — noted. “The Third Man has one of the most intense atmospheres the screen has ever delivered,” he writes in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. Thomson also argues that Welles “was not the best casting” for the part of Lime and that he gave the part “more charm than Greene intended.” Noel Coward who was in the running for the role would have been a better choice, Thomson suggests. By adding charm to Lime, Welles made him a complex and fascinating character. If he were merely a crook we wouldn’t care.

Moviegoers might not notice, when they first see The Third Man, that it’s constructed around three scenes that take place in a Viennese cemetery, appropriately enough since Lime deals in batches of deadly, diluted penicillin that kill and maim infants. The symmetry of the movie gives it a sense of universality and amplifies the themes of friendship, love, and betrayal. Lime, the human rat, dies in the city’s underground sewers, but his friends and lovers don’t and can’t forget him. Welles invites the audience to feel sympathy for an American devil. A lowly rat and yet a vulnerable human being, Lime is curiously absent and yet oddly present in the life of the city. An invisible and elusive fellow, he disappears from the crowd and reappears in the most public of places. He’s a modern Till Eulenspiegel, the trickster, who figures in German folklore and who evades the gallows again and again until he’s finally caught and hung – or does he escape yet again? Watch The Third Man again. It creates a spell, exudes a kind of magic; the soundtrack with the hypothetic zither music written and played by Anton Karas helps immensely, of course.

The cinematographer, Robert Krasker, won an Oscar for The Third Man and well he should have. Carol Reed also deserves credit as the stunning director. But it’s Welles’s bravery that carries the picture. The Third Man came out near the height of the anti-communist crusade in Hollywood when directors deemed subversives were sent to jail and forced into exile. The time of The Third Man was the same time that the Hollywood “Ten” — including Dalton Trumbo, Edward Dmytryk and Ring Lardner, Jr. — were investigated and incarcerated. No one inside or outside Hollywood had the gumption Welles had to play an insidious American when Hollywood was fixated on evil Russians and demonic Chinese, and when American characters who appeared in movies often smacked of star-spangled-banner-sentimentality. Harry Lime gave those portraits the lie. (Of course, not every Hollywood movie from 1949 was an exercise in patriotism. All the King’s Men showed that little dictators grew and thrived on American soil). To the role of Lime, Welles brought an American voice that resonated globally. Into the picture, he injected a cocky, audacious style that reflected the nuclear madness of the Cold War.

Welles gave Lime cinematic immortality and put him alongside the map of iconic figures he’d brought to life: Charles Foster Kane, Hank Quinlan, and Michael O’Hara. “The Third Man” — a modern Everyman — with his diabolical schemes and underground escapades, lives everywhere in the hearts of noir movie lovers. Jonah Raskin, professor emeritus at Sonoma State University and a Fulbright Professor, is the author of 14 books, including American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and the Making of the Beat Generation and Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating and Drinking Wine in California. Share via With The Third Man, Graham Greene wrote a book to write a movie · Page To Screen · The A.V. Club In Page To Screen , we compare a movie to the book that spawned it. The analysis goes into deep detail about specific plot points—in other words, you’ve been warned. Graham Greene’s The Third Man (1950) and Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) The Third Man was not the first screenplay Graham Greene ever wrote, but it was the first one not based on preexisting material.

He had previously adapted his own work (his story “The Basement Room” became 1948’s The Fallen Idol, also directed by The Third Man’s Carol Reed), as well as the work of other writers (1940’s 21 Days Together, based on John Galsworthy’s play The First And The Last). But The Third Man would mark the first time Greene began with what he called “the dull shorthand of a script.” He didn’t like the format. In the introduction to the novella version in Viking’s The Portable Graham Greene, the author commented: “To me it is almost impossible to write a film play without first writing a story. One can reproduce an effect caught in another medium, but one cannot make the first act of creation in script form.” The Third Man “had to start as a story before those apparently interminable transformations from one treatment to another.” The film doesn’t reference the novella in his screenwriter credit.

(The novella was originally published in 1950, after the film’s 1949 release.) So while Graham did write the shooting script that would eventually be filmed, that script is technically the adaptation of a work of prose, a work that was written specifically to be adapted. As Greene stated: “One must have the sense of more material than one needs to draw on” for a screenplay. The novella serves as a “director’s cut” for Greene’s tale of black-market corruption in post-war Vienna. Given that one is a narrative blueprint for the other, the storylines unsurprisingly match nearly beat for beat, with a few revealing exceptions. Also not surprisingly, the book is expository where the film is expressive, the former more concerned with the political workings and police procedures of its divided city, while the latter probes the mood and morality of the destroyed Austrian capital. The production famously shot on location amid bomb craters and piles of rubble. Despite Greene’s claim that the book has an excess of material, the film ends up saying more, with the places it goes that the book doesn’t, as well as in the pervading atmosphere of the story.

Both start with a man named Martins, a writer of “cheap novelettes,” who arrives in Vienna at the behest of Harry Lime, an old school chum who has promised him a vague job in a charity he supposedly runs. (He’s Rollo Martins in the book and Holly Martins in the film, played by Joseph Cotten.) Almost immediately after arriving, Martins learns that Lime is dead, hit by a car in what at first appears to be a tragic accident. Questions arise once Martins learns of a “third man” present at the scene who is not accounted for in the official explanation. Graham, who had worked in the British Secret Intelligence Service, begins both versions by quickly sketching out the complicated structure of post-war Vienna. The region was divided into four zones, with a different power (Russia, Britain, America, France) controlling each. All four share control of the Inner Stadt at the center of the city. This is all explained by Major Calloway—the British police officer investigating Lime—whose first-person perspective the book takes, and who provides the film’s sole instance of voice-over narration.

The book and film iterations of the speech serve the same purpose and differ little in execution, though the film version comments on the visuals it speaks over (for example, a shot of a dead body in a harbor coincides with the reference to black-market amateurs) and has a more flippant tone. In this iconic Third Man moment, here the prose supersedes its cinematic equivalent. Here’s the book version: I never knew Vienna between the wars, and I am too young to remember the old Vienna with its Strauss music and its bogus easy charm; to me it is simply a city of undignified ruins which turned that February into great glaciers of snow and ice. The Danube was a grey flat muddy river a long way off across the second bezirk, the Russian zone where the Prater lay smashed and desolate and full of weeds, on the Great Wheel revolving slowly over the foundation of merry-go-rounds like abandoned millstones, the rusting iron of smashed tanks which nobody had cleared away, the frost-nipped weeds where the snow was thin. I haven’t enough imagination to picture it as it had once been. This is familiar ground for Greene, who elevated his thrillers with his muscular prose and focus on the moral decay of political corruption.

Here’s the voice-over version: I never knew the old Vienna before the war with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm. Constantinople suited me better. I really got to know it in the classic period of the black market. We’d run anything if people wanted it enough and had the money to pay. Of course a situation like that does tempt amateurs, but, well, you know, they can’t stay the course like a professional. Now the city is divided into four zones, you know, each occupied by a power: the American, the British, the Russian and the French. But the center of the city that’s international is policed by an international patrol. One member of each of the four powers. Wonderful! What a hope they had! All strangers to the place and none of them could speak the same language. Except a sort of smattering of German. Good fellows on the whole, did their best, you know. Vienna doesn’t really look any worse than a lot of other European cities. Bombed about a bit. Oh, I was going to tell you, wait, I was going to tell you about Holly Martins, an American. Came all the way here to visit a friend of his.

The name was Lime, Harry Lime. Now Martins was broke and Lime had offered him, some sort, I don’t know, some sort of job. Anyway, there he was, poor chap. Happy as a lark and without a cent. The cinematic intro is similar to the book, but goofier, especially as it’s accompanied by Anton Karas’ famous zither score, which is used to great effect throughout the film (the aural equivalent of someone faking a smile) but is a bit too jaunty here. The tone of the dialogue matches Calloway’s personality (played by Trevor Howard), but it delays the scene being firmly set until the narration ends and Martins realizes his friend is dead. In the book, Lime’s apparent death is a crushing blow. Martins sobs uncontrollably at the funeral and throughout the story talks about his love for Lime. There’s no implication of romantic longing, but he clearly reveres Lime as a hero as much as a friend, the Bart Simpson to his Milhouse. In the film, Martins takes the death more or less in stride, nearly as concerned with where he’ll stay and find money as he is consumed with grief (and, soon enough, suspicions about the circumstances of the death).

IMDB reports that producer David O. Selznick wanted Robert Mitchum for Martins but couldn’t get him due to the actor’s marijuana arrest. Although a great actor, Mitchum inevitably would have pushed Martins even further away from the grief-stricken man the book depicts. Cotten, meanwhile, plays him as thoughtful and sensitive, but with a fairly narrow emotional range. He does not weep like his on-page equivalent, and he’s far more respectful of Anna Schmidt, Lime’s paranoid and bitter lover, who he soon seeks out. Cotten’s Martins cares for her but isn’t a ladies’ man like his character in the book, who is pleased to be in Vienna as it offers some distance from the “incidents” (i.e., clingy women) he left behind in other cities. In the book, a key component to Martins’ investigation stems from a night when he gets drunk and heads to Schmidt’s apartment, merely because he’s lonesome and she’s the only woman he knows in Vienna. At first he’s disappointed that she still has feelings for the man she loves who died but a few days prior, but then—suddenly and for no reason—Martins falls deeply in love with her.

This plotline is downplayed so much in the film that Martins arguably doesn’t fall for Schmidt as much as gravitate toward her as the one person who cared for Lime as much as he did. Schmidt doesn’t have much of a personality in the book. She loved Lime and supports Martins’ investigation into the death, but not to the point where her tenuous immigration status will be threatened. In the film, as played by Alida Valli, Schmidt’s loyalty to Lime is so strong it hijacks the climax of the movie. These changes all enhance the cinematic version of her character. The big twist of both versions is that Lime did not actually die in the car accident, but faked his death to avoid persecution for selling stolen and watered-down penicillin, which resulted in countless deaths. As Lime, Orson Welles’ performance is so iconic he feels like the film’s star despite only having one scene with ample dialogue.

(Criminally, his performance wasn’t even nominated for an Oscar, though it’s hard to find much fault with that year’s winner, All About Eve’s George Sanders.) Once Lime is revealed to be alive, the question driving the story shifts from who Lime’s possible murderers were, to whether his sins are so great as to break Martins’ loyalty to him. Certainly Lime has no guilt about any deaths he indirectly caused. In Lime’s big scene, he and Martins ride a Ferris wheel. Lime’s appearance at the Ferris wheel in the film is actually inferior to the book, where he announces himself with his whistled theme song, a melody he claims to have written but actually stole from a famous and unnamed composer. In the movie, Lime just shows up. He notes how all the people look like dots from that height. “Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?” he asks. “If I offered you 20,000 pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man.

Free of income tax: the only way you can save money nowadays.” At the end of the Ferris wheel scene, Lime makes another argument in favor of dysfunction: “Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and 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 that produce? The cuckoo clock.” This speech, likely The Third Man’s most famous dialogue, is credited to Welles and does not appear in the book. In both monologues, Welles manages to make Lime a combination of sympathetic and sinister, as well as conniving and charming (dig that crack about income taxes). After confirming Lime’s murders and his lack of remorse, Martins struggles with whether he is, to paraphrase Casablanca, more loyal to his friend or his country.

The book describes his rude awakening as the end of a world, “a world of easy friendship, hero-worship, confidence that had begun twenty years before,” the destruction of which taints his memories “like the soil of an atomized town.” He’ll eventually agree to act as bait in a sting operation designed to lure Harry into capture. In the film, Martins doesn’t agree to the operation until he visits the children’s ward of a hospital and views firsthand the horror of what Lime’s forged medicine wrought (we don’t see any dead or deformed children, just Martins’ reaction to them). This scene doesn’t appear in the book, but it’s needed to counter Welles’ anti-heroic charisma, especially absent Calloway’s interpretation of Martins’ internal deliberations. From here, the book and film diverge significantly. In both cases, Lime goes to meet Martins at a cafe, realizes he’s in a trap, and flees to the sewers, where Martins will join the police chase and eventually kill his friend. Both versions end as they began, with a funeral for Harry Lime.

The differences are slight but critical: In the book, Lime is tipped off when he arrives at the meeting place and sees Martins on a phone, and realizes that he’s talking to the police. In the film, Schmidt shows up at the rendezvous point and calls Martins an informant. Lime overhears this as he enters the cafe. When Schmidt sees him, she screams at him to run, definitively siding with him over Martins (and choosing loyalty over morality). In the sewer system, Lime shoots a police officer before getting wounded himself. As Lime is unable to escape and in pain, Martins’ eventual killing of him could be seen as an act of mercy. In the film, though, the two share significant nods before Martins pulls the trigger, a complex gesture that you can take as Lime giving him permission or asking for forgiveness. In the book, Lime says “Bloody fool” for his last words, but Martins can’t decide if they referred to him or if Lime was speaking to himself in an act of contrition. The biggest difference between the book and film comes in the final moments. After Lime’s real funeral, Calloway drives Martins out of the cemetery.

When Martins sees Schmidt walking, he asks to be let out of the car and waits for her on the side of the road. In the film—in one of the great closing shots of all time—she coldly strides past him, her loyalty to Lime intact. In the book, they walk along together and soon her arm is in his, a forced happy ending that Greene and Selznick fought for but were rightfully defeated. Since the movie downplays Martins’ romantic feelings for Schmidt, this snub is more than a repudiation of him personally, but a wholesale rejection of his moral worldview. Despite the fumbled arm-in-arm ending, the book mainly hews very close to film. So why is it is so minor (even outside its not-intended-for-publications status), while the film is one of the towering masterpieces of cinema, residing at the top of the British Film Institute’s top 100? To oversimplify it, the book tells a complicated story in a simple way, while the film tells a simple story in a tremendously sophisticated way. Calloway’s first-person account in the book follows Martins but lacks the insight to know what he’s thinking or doing at all times.

Greene shuffles the chronology a bit, delivering exposition in police-interrogation scenes that lead into flashbacks. All the twists and shifts in allegiance are readily explained and easy to follow. Downplaying Calloway, the film plays like a textbook for how to convey a character’s frame of mind (Martins’) through directorial choices. The Third Man’s cinematography rightfully won the 1951 Oscar (when separate categories existed for color and black-and-white films); it’s second only to Welles’ own Citizen Kane in visual brilliance. In addition to generating some stunning imagery, especially in the expressionist sewer sequence, it fully places the viewer in Martins’ head. Almost every shot is held at an angle, suggesting his confusion and underlining how this world is not on the level. There’s a lot of German dialogue with no subtitles; Martins is at as much of a loss as we are. When the police await Lime’s appearance at the cafe, the shadow of a man stretches across a building facade, showing how completely Lime hangs over the city, even if the shadow ends up belonging to a harmless balloon vendor.

The Third Man is an iconic film, and the things that make it great are expressly cinematic: the cinematography, the score, the “cuckoo clock” speech, the ending. None of these elements have an equivalent in the book. Take the most famous moment of the story, when we learn that Lime is still alive. Here’s how it plays in writing. Martins has just left Schmidt’s apartment, annoyed that she still loves Lime. Walking down the street, he sees an oddly familiar figure against a wall: It was not the face that was familiar, for he could not make out so much as the angle of the jaw; nor a movement, for the body was so still that he began to believe that the whole thing was an illusion caused by shadow. He called sharply, “Do you want anything?” and there was no reply. He called against with the irascibility of drink, “Answer, can’t you,” and an answer came, for a window curtain was drawn petulantly back by some sleeper he had awakened, and the light fell straight across the narrow street and lit up the features of Harry Lime. That’s not embarrassing prose, but it’s hardly memorable.

Here’s how it plays in the film, in what Roger Ebert called “the most famous entrance in the history of the movies.” (This was one of his favorite films; he called it the one that “most completely embodies the romance of going to the movies.”) Right before this clip begins, Schmidt says that the cat only liked Lime, which generates suspense before the reveal, as the cat rubs up against the shoe before Martins even leaves the apartment. The framing of the long shot as Martins hollers in the street conveys the wrecked beauty of the city, along with an uneasy sense of danger though the use of strategic darkness. The famous spark of light reveals the sudden appearance of Orson Welles, who does more with that cryptic smile than most actors do with whole roles. Carol Reed cheats a bit, as the car passes and Lime escapes through an edit as much as cunning. But just this tiny glimpse causes Martins to chase this shadowy figure. The book does offer a valuable opportunity to delve into The Third Man’s characters even deeper. Through Calloway, Greene considers the two sides of both main players.

Calloway wonders if Rollo Martins is really two people: “Rollo,” who “looked at every woman that passed,” and Martins, the Gallant to Rollo’s Goofus, who “renounced them forever.” When Martins pays his booty call on Schmidt, “Rollo was in control.” (That Martins at times goes by his pen name adds even another possible side to his character.) At the end, Calloway speculates that “Harry” is the one fleeing to the sewers, not “Lime.” This intriguing idea doesn’t really get developed. Presumably, it evolved into the film’s motif of characters messing up each other’s names (Schmidt calls Holly “Harry”; Martins calls Calloway “Callahan”). The book also contains more details on Vienna’s political arrangement, which is likely what Greene was principally referring to with his “more material to draw on” method. The film is a better showcase for its setting, offering small details like a car chase that passes a man eating garbage, a small detail that highlights the contrast between Lime and the people he’s hurting. The book also claims the most potent image of either version: At one point, Martins questions a man whose house is filled with religious artifacts.

Marveling at some bone fragments labeled as being from the bodies of saints, he learns they’re simply animal bones with fake labels. An animal masquerading as a saint? That’s Harry Lime. Start with: The film, no contest. Removing Greene’s writing from the film’s imagery is akin to taking it off life support, and the implied relationship between Martins and Schmidt at the end is a false note to go out on. There’s a reason this book isn’t widely discussed in even extended analyses of Greene’s work. Those interested in him would be better off seeking out The Power And The Glory or The Quiet American, which also has an exemplary film adaptation. But for The Third Man, accept no substitutes. Orson Welles - IMDb IMDb Actor | Writer | Director His father was a well-to-do inventor, his mother a beautiful concert pianist; Orson Welles was gifted in many arts (magic, piano, painting) as a child. When his mother died (he was seven) he traveled the world with his father. When his father died (he was fifteen) he became the ward of Chicago's Dr. Maurice Bernstein. In 1931, he graduated from the...

See full bio » Born: a list of 21 people created 23 Feb 2011 a list of 39 people created 31 May 2014 a list of 22 people created 22 Jan 2015 a list of 23 people created 20 Oct 2015 a list of 35 people created 5 months ago Do you have a demo reel? Add it to your IMDbPage How much of Orson Welles's work have you seen? User Polls Won 1 Oscar. Another 24 wins & 16 nominations. See more awards » Known For Touch of Evil Police Captain Hank Quinlan (1958) | Edit Filmography - Episode #1.1 (1980) ... Narrator (voice) 1980 Shogun (TV Movie) 1971 Night Gallery (TV Series) Narrator (segment "Silent Snow, Secret Snow") 1968 The Immortal Story (TV Movie) Mr.

Charles Clay 1960 An Arabian Night (TV Movie) Storyteller 1958 Colgate Theatre (TV Series) Narrator 2000 Moby Dick (Short) (play) Around the World with Orson Welles (TV Mini-Series documentary) (1 episode, 1955) (writer - 5 episodes, 1955 - 2000) (script - 1 episode, 1955) 1973 F for Fake (Documentary) (writer) 1972 Treasure Island (adapted for the screen by - as O.W. Jeeves) 1962 The Trial (written by) 1961 Tempo (TV Series) (written by - 1 episode) 1969 The Merchant of Venice (TV Short) (producer) 1968 Vienna (Short) (producer) 1956 Orson Welles and People (TV Movie) (music arranger) Hide - Three Cases of Murder (2015) ... (performer: "Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)") 1965 Shindig!

(TV Series) (performer - 1 episode) - Shindig in Europe: Part 1 (1965) ...

(performer: "So Many Things to Remember") Hide 1948 Macbeth (set designer - uncredited) Hide 1964 Nella terra di Don Chisciotte (TV Series documentary) (additional photographer) Hide 1982 Trick or Treats (magical advisor) Hide 1989 Dieter & Andreas (Short) (grateful acknowledgment) 1988 Waxwork (dedicated to - as Wells) 1985 Moonlighting (TV Series) (in memory of - 1 episode) 1985 Amazon (TV Series documentary) Himself - Narrator 1983 It's All True (TV Series documentary) Himself (1983) 1982 Arena (TV Series documentary) Himself - Interviewee / Himself 1982 Baryshnikov in Hollywood (TV Movie) Himself 1982 Cinéma cinémas (TV Series documentary) Himself 1982 La nuit des Césars (TV Series documentary) Himself - Le président des Césars 1982 Let Poland Be Poland (TV Movie documentary) Himself 1982 The Quest for Fire Adventure (TV

 Short documentary) Narrator 1978 Tut: The Boy King (TV Movie documentary) Himself - Host 1976 The New Deal for Artists (TV Movie documentary) Narrator (voice) 1975 Who's Out There?

(Documentary short) Host 1975 Orson Welles - das vermarktete Genie (TV Movie documentary) Himself 1975 ABC Late Night (TV Series) Himself - Host / Narrator 1975 Survival (TV Series documentary) Himself - Narrator 1973-1974 Great Mysteries (TV Series) Himself - Host / Himself (host) 1972 V.I.P.-Schaukel (TV Series documentary) Himself 1972 Vive le cinéma (TV Series documentary) Himself 1972 Future Shock (Documentary short) Narrator 1971 The Silent Years (TV Series documentary) Himself - Host 1971 Sentinels of Silence (Documentary short) Narrator (English) (voice) 1970 Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In (TV Series) Himself 1968 Portrait: Orson Welles (TV Short documentary) Himself 1967 The Levin Interview (TV Series documentary) Himself 1966 Reflets de Cannes (TV Series documentary) Himself 1965-1966 National Geographic Specials (TV Series documentary) Himself - Narrator

 / Narrator 1966 Schwierigkeiten beim Zeigen der Wahrheit?

(TV Series documentary) Himself 1966 Late Show London (TV Series) Himself 1964 Nella terra di Don Chisciotte (TV Series documentary) Himself 1963 Biography (TV Series documentary) Himself 1962 Monitor (TV Series documentary) Himself 1962 Pariser Journal (TV Series documentary) Himself 1960 Orson Welles: The Paris Interview (TV Movie documentary) Himself 1959 Cinépanorama (TV Series documentary) Himself 1958 What's My Line? (TV Series) Himself - Guest Panelist 1956 Out of Darkness (TV Series documentary) Himself - Narrator 1955 Person to Person (TV Series documentary) Himself - The Police (1955) ... Himself - Host - Critics (1955) ...

Himself - Host 1955 Press Conference (TV Series) Himself 1943 Show-Business at War (Documentary short) Himself (uncredited) Narrator (English version) (later replaced by Ernest Hemingway) (voice) Hide 1995-2016 Arena (TV Series documentary) Himself - Three Cases of Murder (2015) ... Lord Mountdrago / Himself - Catch-22 (2015) ... Brig. Gen.

Dreedle 2015 Geheimnisvolle Stadt (TV Movie documentary) Himself 2015 Orson Welles: Shadows & Light (TV Movie documentary) Himself 2015 E-penser (TV Series documentary) Himself 2015 Timeshift (TV Series documentary) Himself - Narrator of 'Americans on Everest' 2014 The Sixties (TV Mini-Series documentary) Himself - episode of The Dean Martin Show 1996-2013 American Experience (TV Series documentary) Himself 2013 René Clément, témoin et poète (TV Movie documentary) Himself 2012 Not Fade Away Police Captain Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil (uncredited) 2012 Shakespeare Uncovered (TV Mini-Series documentary) Himself 2011 Just Henry (TV Movie) Harry Lime (uncredited) 2009 España, plató de cine (TV Movie documentary) Himself 2007 Welles Angels (TV Movie documentary) Himself 2007 Is It Real?

(TV Series documentary) Himself 2005 The Originals (Documentary short) Himself 2005 UFO Files (TV Series documentary) Himself 2005 Horror Business (Video documentary) Himself 2004 The Ultimate Film (TV Movie documentary) Himself 2004 Shadowing the Third Man (TV Movie documentary) Himself 2004 The UFO Conspiracy (Video documentary) Himself - Actor 2003 Rita (TV Movie documentary) Himself 2002 The Paranormal Peter Sellers (TV Movie documentary) Himself 2001 Pulp Cinema (Video documentary) Himself 2001 A Huey P. Newton Story (TV Movie documentary) Himself (uncredited) 2000 Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth (TV Short documentary) Himself 2000 Lon Chaney: A Thousand Faces (TV Movie documentary) Himself 1999 E!

Mysteries & Scandals (TV Series documentary) Himself 1999 Modern Marvels (TV Series documentary) Himself 1998 The Great Depression (TV Mini-Series documentary) Himself (discusses War Of The Worlds broadcast) (uncredited) 1997 UFO: Down to Earth (TV Series documentary) Himself 1996 Welles and Hearst (TV Movie documentary) Himself 1996 Where Are All the UFO's? (TV Movie documentary) Himself - Director of 'War of the Worlds' 1995 The Universal Story (TV Movie documentary) Himself 1995 Biography (TV Series documentary) Himself 1993 La classe américaine (TV Movie) Himself 1993 Northern Exposure (TV Series) Kane 1992 Orson Welles: What Went Wrong?

(TV Movie documentary) Himself 1991 The Complete Citizen Kane (TV Movie documentary) Himself 1990 Washes Whiter (TV Series documentary) Himself - Domestos Creeping Dirt commercial 1967 Romy - Portrait eines Gesichts (TV Movie documentary) Albert Hastler - The Advocate Personal Details Other Works: (4/28/60) Stage: Costume Designer for / Directed "Rhinoceros" by Eugène Ionesco , Royal Court Theatre, London, England. See more » Publicity Listings: 16 Biographical Movies | 52 Print Biographies | 21 Portrayals | 52 Articles | 2 Pictorials | 6 Magazine Cover Photos | See more » Official Sites: O.W. Jeeves | G.O. Spelvin | Orson Wells | Wells Height: Did You Know? Personal Quote: Even if the good old days never existed, the fact that we can conceive such a world is, in fact, an affirmation of the human spirit. See more » Trivia: Host/narrator of the BBC/Mutual Radio's "The Black Museum" (1952).

See more » Trademark: Known for his use of low camera angles, tracking shots, deep focus and elaborate crane shots in his films. See more » Star Sign: Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: The Third Man [VHS] The Third Man [VHS] 4.3 out of 5 stars 701 296 people found this helpful 5.0 out of 5 starsGreat surrealist drama of truth and loyalth Bysmarmeron February 17, 2000 It was with great anticipation that I viewed The Third Man recently. I had last seen it nearly 25 years earlier. At the earlier viewing I was impressed with the atmospheric treatment of Vienna and the mystery surrounding Joseph Cotton's search for the truth about his friend Harry (Orson Wells). However, though I then thought of it as a very fine movie, I did not think it would rank in my top 20. Now I see what I missed as a younger person. I can also see why this film would rank as number one on a British list of greatest films of the 20th century.

The film is a surreal examination of the tension between loyalty, love, and friendship on the one hand, and truth and justice on the other. The Viennese are suffused with the cynicism of a destroyed continent and damaged culture. The British know only about the truth and justice side of the equation. The American writer of simple westerns still is naïve enough to care about friendship and truth, and follows both wherever they lead. At the same time, Carol Reed scarcely shoots a scene in which there are right angles. Nearly everything is tilted. Close-ups of faces exaggerate their features. The black and white of the film emphasizes the shadowy nature of the story and its moral underpinnings. At first Holly Martins (Cotton) thinks he is helping his best friend, Harry Lime (Wells). At the same time he becomes Harry's rival for the woman, Anna. When Harry realizes that Holly has discovered his true evil scheme, Harry has a chance to murder Holly and make it look like an accident. What stops him? Friendship? And why does Harry accept Holly's invitation to meet? In the penultimate scene in the underground sewer tunnels, does Holly fire the final and fatal shot, or does Harry kill himself?

This magnificently filmed and wonderfully acted masterpiece has remained in my mind for days after seeing it. If you are a lover of cinema and not merely of movies, please get this classic. It richly deserves its reputation. Highly recommended. 125 people found this helpful 3.0 out of 5 starsOk, but........ ByMartin Lon October 7, 2010 The Studio Canal blu ray version of the Third Man is an ok transfer--but not as good as the version released by Criterion Collection. Having purchased the Studio Canal version, and then subsequently finding a new copy of the Criterion Collection version, it is apparent that each has used a print from a different source. In regards to the Studio Canal version, I noticed some less than stellar frames near the end of the film----where Joseph Cotton is leaning at the road side, watching Alida Valli walk by. In any case, the Studio Canal version isn't bad and I wouldn't discourage its purchase. But if you love this film and want the best print available---try to locate a copy of the Criterion Collection---before they completely disappear.

Question: Orson Welles' iconic character in the film The Third Man is?
Answer: Harry Lime