Film Shapes

This brilliant classic was screened at The Backlot cinema in West Perth as part of the current Book to Film season. It's in my top five favourite films of all time but I think it was the first chance to see it on the big screen and it's as good as I remembered it. Set in post-war Vienna, it stars Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles, Alida Valli, Trevor Howard and Bernard Lee. Harry Lime (Welles) has invited Holly Martins (Cotten) to Vienna with the promise of a job of some kind but when he arrives, he learns the Lime has been killed in a traffic accident. In fantastically economic storytelling, Martins meets various folk - Major Calloway (Howard), Anna Schmidt (Valli) and assorted acquaintances of Lime - and during his ham-fisted investigation he discovers Lime had been watering down penicillin and selling it on the black market. Also, crucially, there was a third man at the scene of the accident, not just the two friends as previously thought.  So begins Graham Greene's intellig...