"You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

In rubble-strewn postwar Vienna, its occupation divided among four powers, Joseph Cotten’s pulp Western writer Holly Martins arrives to meet up with his old friend Harry Lime only to find that he’s dead — or is he? And as the supremely naive Cotten, a monoglot stranger in a strange land, descends through the levels of deception, and as he discovers his own friend’s corruption, the moral choices loom. With its Vienna locations, including the gigantic Prater ferris wheel and the dripping sewers, shot over a five-week period of double shifts (8PM to 5AM, then 10AM to 4PM), this is a triumph of atmosphere, with its tilted camera angles (“to suggest that something crooked was going on” – Reed), its Robert Krasker-shot shadows, and Anton Karas’s unforgettable zither theme. And with its stars in perhaps their most iconic roles: bereted Trevor Howard at his most Britishly military; Alida Valli, after her unsuccessful Hollywood period (Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case), here truly enigmatic and Garboesque; and Welles’s Harry Lime arriving in one of the greatest star entrances ever, and adding the famous “cuckoo clock” speech to Graham Greene’s original script. With the whole topped by its legendary, almost endlessly drawn-out final shot, imposed by Reed over Greene’s original objections.

At the very top of the pantheon of films that define “classic,” The Third Man’s many honors include three Oscar nominations (for Director and Editing; it won for Krasker’s atmosphere-oozing cinematography) and the Grand Prize at Cannes. It also has the distinction of being the only film on both the AFI and BFI Top 100 lists of, respectively, the greatest American and British films (#1 for the Brits) – as well as being named The Greatest Foreign Film of All Time... by the Japanese!

1949. British

Some more dialogue:

Calloway: Go home Martins, like a sensible chap. You don't know what you're mixing in, get the next plane.
Martins: As soon as I get to the bottom of this, I'll get the next plane.
Calloway: Death's at the bottom of everything, Martins. Leave death to the professionals.
Martins: Mind if I use that line in my next Western?

Martins: Have you ever seen any of your victims?
Harry Lime: You know, I never feel comfortable on these sort of things. Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax - the only way you can save money nowadays.

One Review Quote:

“One of that handful of motion pictures (Rashomon, Casablanca, The Searchers) that have become archetypes—not merely a movie that would go on to influence myriad other movies but a construct that would lodge itself deep in the unconscious of an enormous number of people, including people who’ve never even seen the picture. The first time you see it, your experience is dotted with tiny shocks of recognition—lines and scenes and moments whose echoes have already made their way to you from intermediary sources. If you have already seen it, even a dozen or more times, the experience is like hearing a favorite piece of music—you can, as it were, sing along. The Third Man is in fact a brilliant succession of dice throws, a borderline counterintuitive combination of disparate elements that somehow come together as if they had been destined to do so. It is a singular object, a fluke, a well-oiled machine, a time-capsule item, a novelty hit. THERE HAS NEVER BEEN ANOTHER MOVIE QUITE LIKE IT.”
– Luc Sante

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