"The Third Man" (1949) My Thoughts,

I adore this film! A truly fantastic story skilfully told by wonderful filmmakers and acting talent. What more can you really ask for? 

When you start watching this film it feels as fresh today as it must have in 1949.

The film is just dripping with atmosphere and noir splendour with stunning cinematography from Robert Krasker and that iconic quirky musical theme by Anton Karas played on zither that works juxtaposing the noir darkness with it's jaunty jolliness. 

An undeniable element of the charm of this film is the fact it stars Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles. The pair worked together numerous times but most notably in "Citizen Kane" which had been first released eight years before but was a flop on release in 1941 and only started gaining momentum post WW2 so it is likely a lot of the movie going public would have only just seen "Citizen Kane" a couple of years before "The Third Man" hit cinema screens. 

It is impossible to imagine this film starring anyone else, Carol Reed’s original choice for Holly Martins was James Stewart, but producer David O. Selznick had Joseph Cotten under contract so Cotten was a more convenient and economical choice for the production but Ironically Selznick objected to Reed’s choice of Cotten’s long-time collaborator Orson Welles to play Harry Lime, Selznick called Welles “box office poison” and pursued Cary Grant for the role. Thankfully Reed got his way, but Grant was shooting the movie “I Was A Male War Bride” next-door on another sound stage at Shepperton Studios while they were shooting "The Third Man" and would often visit the set. 

The  screen play penned by the great British writer Graham Greene is so rich and smart. The story involves a writer of pulp Westerns, Holly Martins played by Joseph Cotten, who comes to post-war Vienna after being promised a job by his childhood friend Harry Lime.

The story being set in Vienna Austria immediately at the end of the Second World War was such an inspired choice, The city was in a truly singular situation at that time being divided up into all these zones run by different nations and administrations being wide open to black marketeers and must have been an administrative nightmare making the elements of the mystery of the third man so much more plausible.   

When Holly Martins arrives, he discovers that Lime has been killed in an accident. However, he soon finds out, via his investigation along with Lime’s girlfriend Anna (Alida Valli) that his old friend had been stealing penicillin from military hospitals, Diluting it and selling it to civilians directly causing the deaths of men, women & children, and that Lime (Orson Welles) is still alive on on the run.

Lime is a truly despicable yet charming villain and Orson Welles is formidable in the role.

This short monologue delivered by Harry Lime in the film is very memorable some may say iconic, famously this was written into the script by Orson Welles himself. It was not written by Graham Greene.  Welles did not create the speech it is actually paraphrased dialogue from a play Orson he had been in at some point in his career. I must also point out the statement even though it is charming it is also grossly historically inaccurate, The Borgias territory included Switzerland and Cuckoo Clocks are made in the Black Forrest region of Germany.  

This film was not a breeze to make, Orson Welles went missing before shooting started and Carol Reed became dependent on speed to keep to the production schedule.
Orson Welles was a gifted actor and intelligent man and he knew it... he had a serious ego and proved to be a nightmare on the shoot, He went travelling around Europe seeing the sights as the film was meant to be shooting and he eventually arrived on set two weeks late then refused to shoot the sewer scenes on location, meaning Reed had to not only use body doubles for Welles in the sewer chase sequence he also had to build a Vienna sewer set at Shepperton Studios back in the U.K. to shoot closeups of Welles later. Orson did settle down once the shoot was underway and reportedly he enjoyed playing Lime.

There has been a persistent  rumour / urban legend that Orson Welles actually "ghost-directed" the film which is patently false, he did contribute that “cuckoo clock” speech but the film is most definitely Reed's film.

The production schedule was gruelling Reed was having to shoot three film units simultaneously just to keep on schedule, and became dependant on Dexedrine to facilitate  him working up to 20-hour a day. People have suggested that this situation is what led Reed to opt for the brilliantly skewed visual style used in the film. Not everyone was as enamoured of the "dutch angles" used. After seeing the film for the first time Reed’s friend, director William Wyler apparently sent him a gift of a spirit level, with an attached note,

“Carol, next time you make a picture, just put this on top of the camera, will you?” 

As with all cinematic classics it had a mixed critical response on release,   

In Austria, "local critics were underwhelmed" and the film ran for only a few weeks.

The Viennese publication Arbeiter-Zeitung, although critical of a "not-too-logical plot", did praise the film's "masterful" depiction of a "time out of joint" and the city's atmosphere of "insecurity, poverty and post-war immorality".

It seems strange now since the film has become so ingrained into Austrian culture that there is an entire museum in Vienna dedicated solely to The Third Man. 

William Cook, after his 2006 visit to the Third Man Museum in Vienna, wrote, "In Britain it's a thriller about friendship and betrayal. In Vienna it's a tragedy about Austria's troubled relationship with its past."

Some critics at the time criticised the film's unusual camera angles.

C. A. Lejeune wrote in The Observer newspaper described Reed's,

"habit of printing his scenes askew, with floors sloping at a diagonal and close-ups deliriously tilted" as "most distracting". 

Now we know the "Dutch Angles" is one of the ingredients that makes the film great.   

On its release in Britain and America, the film was overwhelmingly positively received. 

Time Magazine wrote that the film was "crammed with cinematic plums that would do the early Hitchcock proud—ingenious twists and turns of plot, subtle detail, full-bodied bit characters, atmospheric backgrounds that become an intrinsic part of the story, a deft commingling of the sinister with the ludicrous, the casual with the bizarre."

Famous movie critic Roger Ebert wrote,

"I remember the kitten in the doorway too. It was a rainy day in Paris in 1962, and I was visiting Europe for the first time. A little cinema on the Left Bank was showing The Third Man, and I went, into the humid cave of Gauloise smoke and perspiration, and saw the movie for the first time. When Welles made his entrance, I was lost to the movies." He added it to his canon of "Great Movies" list and wrote, "Of all the movies that I have seen, this one most completely embodies the romance of going to the movies." In a special episode of Siskel & Ebert in 1994 discussing film villains, Ebert named Lime as his favourite film villain. Gene Siskel remarked that it was an "exemplary piece of moviemaking, highlighting the ruins of World War II and juxtaposing it with the characters' own damaged histories".

The film was made for a non-disclosed sum but I'm going to guess it was made for around £500'000 (£14.6m in 2024) and it took £277,549 at the UK box office alone (equivalent to £8.2m in 2024) so I am sure it was a big hit globally.  

The film is frequently named as among the greatest ever made It is one of my Top 5 of all time.  

The British Film Institute (BFI) called it the greatest ever film from the U.K. in 1999.

The American Film Institute (AFI) labelled it the 57th best American film in 1998.

The duel nationality comes from the film being co-produced by Britain’s Alexander Korda and America’s David O. Selznick.