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The past 66 years have been kind to Carol Reed's The Third Man. It's lauded as one of the finest examples of film noir and one of the greatest cinematic achievements of all time.
The Graham Greene script has been studied, pulled apart and pieced back together endlessly, with the most common consensus declaring the twisty, cynical, dark screenplay a stroke of genius. Joseph Cotten's jaded alcoholic hero and Orson Welles' charismatically diabolical villain are high-water marks for the genre.
What really makes the film sing, though, isn't the jaunty and iconic zither score by Anton Karas. It's the film's groundbreaking visual aesthetic, which combines noir tropes with expressionism to create a visual wonderland of living shadows.
It's never looked better than in its new 4K digital restoration.
Filmed on location in post-war Vienna, the story follows downtrodden American pulp writer Holly Martins (Cotten) to Austria, where old friend Harry Lime (Welles) has promised him a copywriting gig. Trouble is, Martins arrives just in time for Lime's funeral. Given his propensity for heavy drinking and imagining pulp fiction, Martins begins investigating his friend's death, traversing the shells of bombed-out buildings and running afoul of the police.
The shocking truth of Lime's dealings is the stuff of nightmares. But more haunting than any plot detail is the film's eerie visual landscape. Vienna is a character itself, and Robert Krasker's Oscar-winning cinematography brings it to life with light and shadow as stark as an artist's stenciling. Every corner of the labyrinthine city seems to hide a secret, lurking just outside of the light.
That artistry—nowadays created using CGI in films like Sin City—accompanied by disorienting camera angles, creates a dread that permeates every frame. Quiet strolls are foreboding. A giant Ferris-wheel ride becomes a gut-wrenching exercise in suspense.
It culminates in an extended foot chase—still among the best ever shot—that spills from the streets to the sewers, where shadows seem alive and the ancient architecture evokes an M.C. Escher painting transformed into a maze. It's breathless, jaw-dropping stuff—a fully realized mystery that shines because the characters don't simply operate within an environment—they're shaped by it. Three generations later, 1949's The Third Man still exceeds its reputation.
SEE IT: The Third Man opens Friday at Cinema 21. GRADE: A
WWeek 2015