The Third Man review - a near-perfect work (1949, Carol Reed; StudioCanal, PG, DVD/Blu-ray)

[Celerity]

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/aug/02/the-third-man-review-philip-french



From the moment the first audiences saw the opening image of Anton Karas’s zither filling the screen with the nerve-jangling Harry Lime Theme (before, indeed, they had heard the word “zither”), they knew that with the second collaboration between director Carol Reed and author Graham Greene they were in for something special. At its end they recognised they’d seen a near-perfect work, what we now call a noir classic. The title rapidly entered the language and took on new meanings as the careers of Greene as wartime intelligence agent and Kim Philby as cold war traitor became linked.

The story features an evil, charismatic anti-hero who fakes his own death and makes his home in a Viennese sewer, and ends with its dull, perplexed leading man being silently snubbed by the beautiful, unsmiling heroine in a deserted cemetery. This new print does full justice to Robert Krasker’s dazzling, Oscar-winning black-and-white photography and its exhilaratingly forlorn postwar Vienna, and it’s accompanied by two excellent documentaries, one about the making of the movie and its afterlife, the other about the career of Greene, then at the height of his power as both a novelist and screenwriter.

The Third Man is essentially Greene’s movie and it’s permeated with the art of Catholic beliefs, his feeling for immanent good and evil, his fascination with storytelling, with men in flight and pursuit, with life lived on what Robert Browning called (in a favourite quote of Greene’s) “the dangerous edge of things”. But this is a movie to which many contributed, and it has grown richer with the passing years. Producer Alexander Korda came up with the setting – a corrupt, politically divided Vienna – as the perfect location for Reed and Greene’s follow-up to The Fallen Idol, which he’d produced. Greene devised the plot, which had its origins in a single startling image he’d jotted down on the flap of an envelope: “I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, so that it was with incredulity that I saw him pass by without sign of recognition, among the host of strangers in the Strand.” Korda’s co-producer David Selznick provided money, the prospect of wide distribution in America, two stars from his own stable (Alida Valli and Joseph Cotten, who came to represent the soul of a surviving Europe and a dangerously innocent America), and an anti-Soviet undercurrent that Reed and Greene quietly buried, at least in the British version.



Then there’s Orson Welles as Harry Lime, leader of the gang peddling adulterated penicillin in Vienna. He dominates the film both by his presence and his absence. He was difficult to pin down, even for his brief appearances. Reed used the time shooting at night, while waiting for Welles to show up, to experiment with tilted cameras and surreal shadows in narrow, gleaming nocturnal streets that became one of the film’s hallmarks.

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[cachukis]

1. One of the best.

[Zorro]

2. A good, bleak movie with a great zither soundtrack

I read quite a few of Greene's books in my younger days, but there's one thing in his background I didn't know until quite a few years later -- his controversial review of Shirley Temple's movie Wee Willie Winkie.

https://thecharnelhouse.org/2014/02/25/graham-greenes-infamous-review-of-wee-willie-winkie-1937-starring-shirley-temple/