The Third Man - Criterion Collection
(2-Disc Edition) starring Orson
Welles, Alida Valli, Trevor Howard,
Ernst Deutsch, Joseph Cotten
The Third Man
The fractured Europe post-World War II is perfectly captured in Carol
Reeds masterpiece thriller, set in a Vienna still shell-shocked from battle.
Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) is an alcoholic pulp writer come to visit his
old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles). But when Cotton first arrives in
Vienna, Limes funeral is under way. From Limes girlfriend and an
occupying British officer, Martins learns of allegations of Limes
involvement in racketeering, which Martins vows to clear from his friends
reputation. As he is drawn deeper into postwar intrigue, Martins finds layer
under layer of deception, which he desperately tries to sort out. Welless
long-delayed entrance in the film has become one of the hallmarks of
modern cinematography, and it is just one of dozens of cockeyed camera

angles that seem to mirror the off-kilter postwar society. Cotten and Welles
give career-making performances, and the Anton Karas zither theme will
haunt you. --Anne Hurley
Personal Review: The Third Man - Criterion Collection (2-Disc
Edition) starring Orson Welles, Alida Valli, Trevor Howard, Ernst
Deutsch, Joseph Cotten
The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)
Pauline Kael once said of Citizen Kane that it was the most fun you'd ever
have watching a great film. I agree with the sentiment--I'm sure everyone
has at least one movie they feel that way about--but for me, its recipient
has always been Carol Reed's The Third Man, one of the many fine
Graham Greene adaptations that's made its way to the screen (there are
some authors whose work seems almost immune from being destroyed by
bad adaptations, and Greene may well be one of them; of course, it helps
that he adapted this one himself). No less an august body than the BFI
called The Third Man the best British film ever produced. I'm not sure I'd
go that far, but I just checked my list of the hundred best movies ever
made, and only three British films rank higher. (None of them, I'm sure, has
ever been mentioned by the BFI in remotely the same breath as this
movie; my tastes tend to diverge from the crowd somewhat. And for the
record, they're Richard Eyre's Iris (#11), Alan Parker's Pink Floyd: The
Wall (#33), and Harry Bromley Davenport's XTRO (#36). The Third Man
sits at #38.)
Every film on my top 100 list is there for different reasons, but many of
them share certain qualities. One of those is rewatchability; with very rare
exceptions, it seems to me that one can't truly call a movie great if one
can't imagine oneself watching it over and over again as time goes on,
always deriving great pleasure from it. I've lost count of the number of
times I've seen The Third Man over the years; certainly more than a dozen,
probably closer to twoscore. It's a movie that has everything; a fantastic
script, wonderful acting, a director and cinematographer who were both at
the tops of their respective games, wonderful scenery, and, perhaps most
strikingly, a rare star turn from the early career of Orson Welles in a movie
he didn't direct.
If you've somehow been in a cave for the past sixty years, here's a quick
rundown of the plot: Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), a hack writer, is
summoned to Vienna, Austria, by his old school friend Harry Lime
(Welles), who wants Martins to write some promotional materials for Lime's
prescription drug business. Arriving there, however, he gets to Lime's
apartment and finds out the man's just been killed in an auto accident. He
manages to get to the funeral just in time, where he finds himself
embroiled in a game of cat and mouse involving a couple of stiff-upper-lip
British military police (Trevor Howard and Bernard Lee), Lime's beautiful
girlfriend (Alida Valli), and two of Lime's shadier friends (Ernst Deutsch and
Siegfried Breuer). Supposedly, the two friends were with Lime when he

died, but the porter in Lime's building swears there was a third man helping
to carry the body after the accident; who was the third man? And what if it
wasn't an accident at all?
This is the kind of mystery that no one knows how to do any more (with the
arguable exception of Hideo Nakata, whose Chaos borrows, visually, from
The Third Man more than once). Reed unravels the mystery here just as
much visually as he does through Martins' detective work. The viewer is
expected to pay attention, to see the mystery rather than simply learning
about it through the characters' conversations. What was the last
Hollywood mystery you saw that did such a thing? Not that a great mystery
can't be done conventionally; both The Maltese Falcon and The Usual
Suspects come to mind as examples. But The Third Man is, as far as I can
tell, unique in the way Reed unfolds the story; it's not enough that Graham
Green wrote (and adapted) a cracking good mystery, and that the casting
director staffed it with such phenomenal actors, each of whom turns in a
stunning performance. It's Reed's visual language that takes this out of the
realm of the good and into the realm of the spectacular. Everyone
remembers Orson Welles' cuckoo clock speech, to be sure, but everyone
also remembers the climactic scene with those fingers sticking out of the
sewer grate; how many times have you seen it used in a movie since? It's
become part of the language of film. Or Cotten standing at the base of the
Ferris wheel? There's a reason is shows up in those best-movies-ever TV
shows all the time; it's become iconic. But it's not just those scenes, of
course. The entire movie is chock full of incredible images like this. Just
rent it, put it on the DVD player, sit back, and enjoy the spectacle of the
thing. And if you happen to get caught up in the engrossing story and
wowed by the acting, well, that's just icing on the cake sometimes. Graham
Greene could turn out a mystery like no other, and The Third Man began
the golden age of Carol Reed's career (aside from collaborating once
again with Greene on the other best Greene adaptation ever, Our Man in
Havana, he was also responsible for such classics as Trapeze, Oliver!,
and The Agony and the Ecstasy); there is almost nothing wrong with this
movie at all. (The one thing that always nags me, however, is Harry Lime's
first spoken lines; Welles always did have a tendency to go for the overly
theatrical...) If you've never seen it, run, do not walk, to your nearest video
rental store and pick a copy up. One of the hundred best films ever made.
**** ½
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