The Third Man

Iconic imagery, iconic settings, and an iconic score have made Carol Reed’s The Third Man one of film noir’s quintessential and most enduring works. Based on a Graham Greene short story and set in partitioned Vienna immediately after the war, the film masterfully depicts the exhausted population of an exhausted city where human purpose is as hard to come by as penicillin on the black market (“I don’t know anything anymore, except that I want to be dead too”). Joseph Cotten masterfully combines naiveté and savvy as American crime novelist Holly Martens, just arrived in Vienna to meet his best friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles), who apparently has been run over by a car and killed. While the official police report states that Lime’s body was carried by two men, the German Kurtz (Erich Ponto) and the Romanian Popescu (Siegfried Breuer), Martens learns from Lime’s porter (Paul Hörbiger) that there was a third man. When the porter ends up dead, Martens resolves to assist Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) and the Royal Military Police to discover the truth about his friend’s death, even if the truth hurts. Alida Valli plays Lime’s mysterious girlfriend Anna Schmidt for whom Martens also develops romantic inclinations. Despite being in front of the camera instead of behind it, Welles must have at least partially influenced Reed’s aesthetic choices given the prevalence of Dutch angles, asymmetrical compositions, and the use of novel settings such as baroque theaters and apartments, a virtually abandoned amusement park, and the labyrinthine sewer system. Amidst the ruins and desperation of Vienna, Reed also incorporates quotidian, almost Hitchcockian cut-away shots (a stray cat, a little boy and his ball) to both foreshadow and relieve tension.