The Third Man (1949)

THE THIRD MAN  (1949)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Carol Reed
    Joseph Cotten, Valli, Orson Welles,
    Trevor Howard, Bernard Lee, Ernst Deutsch
Life, death and betrayal in post-war Vienna, with Joseph Cotten as a naive American named Holly Martens, a writer of pulp westerns who turns up in the city broke, hoping to track down a shady character named Harry Lime, an old friend who has promised him a job. Holly's timing is not good. The day he arrives is the day of Lime's funeral, and when he finds out how Harry died - run over by a car in the street - he becomes suspicious and starts to do a little investigating. So he barges around Vienna, chasing down leads and stumbling on clues, warned at every turn to give up and go home, what he's digging into is evil, and nothing he does or finds out is going to help anybody, anyway. He's in over his head. He has no idea how much. Orson Welles, still young and light on his feet, appears late in the film, and Alida Valli plays a displaced woman who's seen too much, a lost soul who made the mistake of loving Harry. Trevor Howard and Bernard Lee are perfectly understated as uniformed members of the British occupying force. Graham Greene wrote the script, Carol Reed shot on location, and zither music plays nonstop on the soundtrack. The city looks ruined, much of the story plays out at night, and the dramatic climax takes place in a sewer. You could say they don't make 'em like they used to, which is true, and you couldn't make 'em like this one if you wanted to. The combination of time, place and artistic chemistry that produced "The Third Man" only occurred once. It could never be replicated, and what would be the point, anyway, when you can watch "The Third Man"?