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The Third Man


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 intelligent screenplay, adapted from his own novella, which he used as a base treatment for the film. The director, Carol Reed, is almost at the end of his purple patch of Odd Man Out (1947), another Greene-penned film, The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949), though the film he followed these with, Outcasts of the Islands (1951), is interesting. He returned to yet another Greene text in 1959 with Our Man in Havana, and then virtually signed off his career with the terrific Oliver! in 1968. That's a bloody fine legacy. 


Something I should really have known, but heard from the presenters (Michael and John) at the talk after the film, was that the cinematographer, Robert Krasker, was actually from Perth (in fact, born in Alexandria on the way to Perth, but close enough). Along with all the other geniuses at play here, Krasker is a huge part of the success of The Third Man. The look of the city streets bathed in moist shadow and rubble, the angular tilts, the high and low vantage points, all German Expressionism galore, really make this a visual feast, of course shot in starkly stunning monochrome.


There are iconic scenes throughout. The cat sitting at the shoes of somebody obscured in a doorway. The conversation at the top of the Wiener Riesenrad, the huge Ferris wheel in Vienna's Prater Park (massive thrill to ride on this in 1998 with Crips and Hutchy). The sewer chase sequence. The fingers reaching through the grate. The bleak cemetery staging one of the best final shots in cinema history. And most of this accompanied by Anton Karras's memorable zither score. 

Look, you get the idea. The whole thing is right out of the top drawer. Chase it down if you haven't seen it. You won't regret it.

See also:

Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) is a masterpiece and, as mentioned above, Reed's Odd Man Out (1947) and The Fallen Idol (1948) are fine films also.
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