The Third Man (50th Anniversary Edition) - Criterion Collection

Rating:
Summary: A magnificent piece of cinema
Review: Poor Orson Welles. My earliest memories of the man come from the 1970s and early 1980s, roughly the last ten or so years of his life. People told me he once had Hollywood in the palm of his hand, that he was a cinematic genius, and that his tempestuous relationships with the studios ruined his career. An impressive list of information pointing to a powerful man, wouldn't you say? Sadly, I heard these things when Welles was doing wine commercials to make ends meet. "We'll sell no wine before its time" doesn't evoke visions of a cinematic genius, that's for sure. Nor did his physical presence impress me all that much. Orson Welles, according to information I have seen, weighed nearly 350 pounds at one point and remained severely obese until the end of his life. I'm not knocking on people with weight problems, but it's just another example of how difficult it was for me to imagine the man as a Hollywood heavyweight (no pun intended). Then I grew up and watched some of his classic films, i.e. "Touch of Evil," "Citizen Kane," and the incredibly atmospheric "The Third Man." The glowing accolades started making a lot more sense. No wonder filmgoers love this guy's films; they're masterpieces in nearly every way.

"The Third Man" takes place in the shattered ruins of post-World War II Vienna. Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton), an alcoholic hack who bangs out western novels, arrives in town to a mystery greater than anything he ever wrote about. His old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) sent him a letter some time before offering him a job in Vienna, but Martins discovers when he gets there that his pal recently perished in an unfortunate traffic accident. The writer shows up in time to witness Lime's funeral and to meet his buddy's beautiful girlfriend Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli). He also runs afoul of the British occupation force, especially Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), a man who has nothing nice to say at all about Harry Lime. In fact, Calloway insists that Martins leave town immediately, much to the writer's consternation. Fortunately for Holly, a local reading group discovers he is an author and invites him to give a lecture a few days down the road. This gives Martins an excuse to stick around and investigate the increasingly suspicious nature of his old friend's passing. Questions about how the accident unfolded bring conflicting answers from witnesses. Anna Schmidt, who faces a possible expatriation to the Soviet Union's sector of the city, provides few answers to Martins's questions. Something sinister is going on in Vienna, and Holly Martins wants to get to the bottom of it.

I'm not spoiling a thing by saying that Harry Lime never perished in that traffic accident. Why he staged his own passing, and how Holly Martins discovers the ruse, is the central element of "The Third Man." It turns out Lime is involved in a particularly loathsome black market scheme, along with several unsavory European characters, that threaten the health of Vienna's children. Calloway shows Martins up close what Lime's handiwork has done to the city's youths. The British have been on Lime's trail for ages, and that is why he doesn't want Holly Martins lurking around Austria. Once the British officer knows that the writer isn't about to condone what his friend is doing, he lets him in on the case and tries to use Martins to bring Lime out of the woodwork. There are only two things complicating the search for Harry Lime: Martins falls in love with Anna Schmidt and Lime is one slick operator who isn't about to go down without a fight. When the two old friends finally meet on a Ferris wheel, the encounter turns into a memorable exposition on the merits of right and wrong. Despite Lime's blithe belief in what he's doing for a buck, his time is about to run out. Holly Martins can't save his friend even as he cannot convince Anna to give up her love for Harry. The two sequences at the end of the film, the sewer chase and the funeral scene, will stay you with for eons.

What's not to like about this movie? Try as I might, I can't think of anything I would want to see changed. The performances are magisterial, the dialogue transcendent, and the set pieces perfectly match the sordid storyline. Repeatedly, memorable scenes march across the screen. The shadow of the guy with the balloons looming on the buildings, the vividness of the wet cobblestones in the nighttime street scenes, and the hunted look on Harry Lime's face as the authorities corner him in the sewer like the rat he is all stick in the memory banks with the tenacity of molasses. Just as memorable is Anton Karas's zither score, an odd choice for a noir film yet a tune that fits the story perfectly and will have you humming for weeks afterwards. The question I ought to ask should go something like this: what I can say about this marvelous picture that hasn't been said by others a million times before? No one with an ounce of appreciation for the cinematic form, regardless of their personal favorites, can deny the beauty and power of this film.

Criterion goes above and beyond the call of duty with their DVD version of the film. Supplements are plentiful and lengthy: an alternate opening voice narration track, footage of Anton Karas playing the movie's theme on his famous zither, a short documentary about how the Viennese police patrol their extensive sewer system, an introduction by Peter Bogdanovich, episodes from Welles's Harry Lime radio show, and much more. The picture quality looks great, the sound quality is very nice, and the movie is a masterpiece. Don't wait as long as I did to see this phenomenal picture; it's every bit as good as you've heard.


Rating:
Summary: Deserves 'Classic' status
Review: The Third Man begins as a mystery story about Holly Martins's search for answers when his best friend Harry Lime is killed in an alleged traffic accident days before they were to be reunited after many years spent apart. Holly quickly discovers a number of inconsistencies in the reported events of Lime's death. Intrigued by these clues Holly senses a deeper conspiracy at work and refuses to return to the US at the request of the local law enforcement, Major Calloway. Calloway also describes Lime to Holly as a major bootlegger and murderer, adding to Cotton's desire to learn the truth about his friend he considered incapable of the atrocities alleged by Calloway. Lime's girlfriend Anna Schmidt assures Cotton that Calloway is lying.

The story takes place in post-WWII Vienna, a bombed out shell of a city that has been divided into 4 quarters, each governed by either America, France, England, or Russia. The film was shot entirely on location, a choice the director had to battle intensely with the studio over. This was critically important to the entire character of the film, and is a rare documentation of the true destruction in Europe in a post war Hollywood film. The beleaguered city surrounds the characters in the film and adds to the depth of our understanding of them.

The black and white cinematography and style of this film might remind the viewer of Citizen Kane. However I felt no similarity between the two films other than that they are both excellent films in their own way that take full advantage of the focus and shading available when shooting in black and white instead of color.

Some call Orson Welles' mysterious entrance in The Third Man the greatest in all of film. I agree it is quite clever, but it failed to evoke a strong sense of drama in me personally. My sense of the scene was more of anticlimax, the viewer is expecting this to happen eventually, and the surprise is mild at best. Still, Welles' performance in The Third Man is easily equal to that of Citizen Kane, despite being a significantly smaller role. The true nature of Welles' character is never fully revealed, the viewer must draw their own conclusions from his brief appearances from the shadowy underworld he inhabits.

Holly is something of a mirror image of Lime. In America Holly is a writer of pulp mystery and western novels and is well known even in Europe. Holly represents the innocence and relative naiveté of America in his misunderstanding of the conflicting interests Lime and so many others in Europe surely faced both during and after the war. Holly's sad realization that his best friend since childhood was capable of such horrible actions surely changes him forever. Did the war bring out these actions, or were they lurking hidden from view all along? The conclusion of The Third Man is decidedly not a happy formula Hollywood ending, as the studio desired.

Rating:
Summary: Coo Coo Clock Perfect
Review: Orsen Welles wrote his coo coo clock speech for the Ferris wheel scene. That's the one everyone remembers, but in truth Graham Greene, a wry British post-modern wrote the screenplay. He had Kim Colby, Stalin's, suave foreign office spy in mind. Carol Reed directed a very Citizen Kane like film in the ruins of 1946 Austria. Everyone will recognize the unusual film angles, scene cuts, and black and white shadows as Orwellian. However, I'm taking nothing away from Reed. This film is as good a European Film Noir as you'll find. The film glides effortlessly till the ending in the sewers under Vienna.

Cotton plays the naive American that arrives in Vienna to take up a job with a flamboyant, immoral, schoolboy friend, Harry Lime (Welles). However, Harry Lime in reality is running a black market scheme in stolen penicillin, which results in the death of hundreds of innocents. Cotton learns Harry has been killed in a suspicious car crash. Cotton then runs into Trevor Howard, a British Military, Lime's girlfriend, actress Alida Valli, and assorted suspicious characters. Nothing is what it seems and Cotton is soon involved in international intrigue. A mandolin plays in the background and it's very unsettling.

Films about the gray area between good and evil and the unintentional foolishness of do-gooders are not easy to complete without created cardboard characters, but there's no need to fear for The Third Man is damn near perfect, one of the best films ever made.


Rating:
Summary: Buy it and cherish
Review: It's pretty well redundant to say that this is a wonderful movie, so let me just say that Criterion has given movie lovers a gift that will be appreciated forever - they have taken a great work of art and restored it to its original pristine beauty.

What a joy!


Rating:
Summary: A Masterpiece of Movie Making and Story Telling
Review: Everything about this movie works. If anyone wants to see how a movie should be directed and edited, or a screenplay written, or complex characters acted, or a film photographed, this is the one to flip in the DVD machine.

Holly Martins, a down-on-his-luck writer, shows up in post-war Vienna looking for his old friend, Harry Lime. But he's told Lime died in an accident, the military tell him to go home, and he's attracted to a mysterious woman he sees at Lime's grave. He sticks around, gets different stories about Lime, but finally understands Lime was an unscrupulous black marketeer, dealing in adulterated drugs among other things. And he realizes that Lime is alive.

Carol Reed was at the top of his form with this movie. His partnership with Graham Greene (they had collaborated the year before on The Fallen Idol and would again in 1959 with Our Man in Havana) is unusual in that both were heavyweights in their fields.

Joseph Cotten as Martins strikes just the right note of charm, inquisitiveness and weakness. He's the kind of a guy who would most likely follow the strongest person around, and that has been his old friend, Lime. And what a great voice Cotten had. Orson Welles, who could be so hammy, reins it in here. He doesn't have a lot of screen time, but his character dominates the movie. And the two work perfectly together. Welles' cuckoo speech has been mentioned so many times in so many places that it has lost much of its charm for me. It sounds to me now more like an alienated high school kid's idea of philosophy. But Lime's discussion of all those little dots goes to the heart of his character. The interplay on Cotten's and Welles' faces as they discuss how easy (or how difficult) it might be to get rid of Martins on the ferris wheel is masterful, and so is Welles as he teases out of Martins what Martins may have told the military police. Alida Valli as Anna is terrific as a woman who loves Lime but has no illusions left. I suspect Trevor Howard took the role of Major Calloway because he wanted to work with Reed and Greene. In 1949 he was a major star in England, with Brief Encounter under his belt. I've always liked him, even in most of the later lousey movies he signed up for.

And the look and sound of the film...glistening, damp cobblestones at night, bombed out buildings, off-angle camera shots, harsh nightime lighting and deep shadows. The chase through the sewers with only the sounds of rushing water and footsteps. The first glimpse of Lime, nothing but deep shadows in a doorway and then a pair of shoes of someone unseen standing there. The sound of the zither playing the main theme over and over.

The ending is one of the most understated and powerful I've ever seen. Lime has been shot in the sewer by Martins. Martins and Calloway leave the funeral in a jeep to catch his plane home. Anna ignores them and leaves the cemetery on foot. The jeep passes Anna but then Martins asks Calloway to let him out. He obviously has feelings for her. Martins leans against a cart on the side of the road as Calloway drives off. The camera doesn't move. Anna, in the distance, walks toward him. Without looking at him she walks straight past, and past the camera. Martins lights a cigarette, looks after her, then tosses the match away. And that's it.

The Criterion edition is just as superb as the movie, and the extras are worth watching.

Rating:
Summary: Great, predictable, surprising
Review: I see our old friends the reviewers have told the whole plot as usual. Of a murder mystery. Every damned one of them that I read. And that includes Amazon's hired reviewer. That ought to spoil the movie thoroughly for you. It is never made explicit who the third man is, but to infer it is just one of the subtleties of this flick. The fate of Harry Lime is a foregone conclusion as soon as the English officer tells his story. The fate of the porter also as soon as Holly Martins mentions the third man to a third person. Everything else is a shock, including the last scene. An engrossing though heavy-handed plot. Green adapted his own novel for the screen, which is like gold to anyone who cares about the story. I know nothing about the making of a movie, but I've got to say that this is the best directed picture I have ever seen in my life. I thought it was better than Hitchcock. I don't like Joseph Cotton and I don't like Orson Welles, but I liked this movie and thought Welles in particular did a wonderful job of acting. I also thought he seemed a little affected and smug, not intended as part of the character he was playing but rather as just a part of his character.

Rating:
Summary: Harry and his little dots
Review: Penniless "American poet" Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) comes to Vienna at the invitation of his old schoolmate Harry Lime (Orson Welles) who promised him a job. He arrives just in time to attend Harry's funeral. Post-war Vienna is divided in four zones and nearly everyone has become a racketeer in order to survive. Harry's recent friends - former high society who lead a shadowy existence - assert that he loved his old friend till the end: " he has spoken of you during his agony". Holly does not believe that Harry's death was an accident. Someone must have pushed him under this car... He tries to track the mysterious "third man" who carried off Harry's body. Harry's suspicion is confirmed when the sole eyewitness is slashed.

Bomb-wrecked Vienna is an impressive scenery but the impression that Holly leaves on the members of Vienna's literary club is not a lasting one: He does not know James Joyce and Edgar Wallace is his idol...

Officer Calloway (Trevor Howard) informs Holly that Harry was the most perfidious of all racketeers. His contraband: watered-down penicillin. Calloway shows Holly photos of Harry's victims - the harm that encephalitis does to children's brains - in the hope that Holly will play the informer. But Holly vacillates. He would like to take over Harry's girlfriend Anna (Alida Valli). But she cherishes Harry's remembrance because he got her a passport (She's Czech and afraid of the Soviets). Calloway raids her apartment and confiscates her passport together with her love-letters. Her cat loved Harry too. This lithe creature snuggles up to a stranger in the depth of night - and Holly recognizes his old friend who gives him a roguish smile.

Harry and Holly meet under Vienna's Giant Wheel. Harry is cheerful and chipper and has a peaceful conscience. The wheel goes round and Harry reflects on the "little dots" (people) down there...Besides: he had no intention to further Holly's career. Just his exitus. Only the news that "his" body has been exhumed hinders him.

Holly is prepared to lure Harry into a trap if Calloway gives Anna a new passport. But she refuses to build up an existence on Harry's misfortune. Since she behaves like a lady Holly decides to behave like a gentleman. And a gentleman does not betray his friends...But a visit to the military hospital - suffering children are more convincing than photos of suffering children - makes him charnge his mind again.

The hunting party sounds the mort and sets the dogs on Harry the game. His escape through Vienna's sewerage system is one of the most famous scenes in film history. Echoes mystify him and he trembles with fear like a cornered rat...Harry deserves no pity but Orson's performance is so magnificent...

Harry Lime admired Mussolini's motto: "During the reign of the Borgias we had Michelangelo, Leonardo and the renaissance. In Switzerland we had 500 years of peace and what have we got - the cuckoo clock!". What Harry forgot was that Michelangelo refused to work for the Borgias just as Toscanini refused to work for the Duce. And 500 years of peace have made Switzerland a healthy country. The only reason why a Swiss painter could not paint the Mona Lisa is that Swiss women don't look moribund...