A review of the classic 1949 film “The Third Man”
We tend to think of film noir as primarily a genre emanating from America and typically set in Los Angeles, but this classic of the genre is a British production shot on location in post-war Vienna. Written for the screen by Graham Greene and directed by Carol Reed, the cast is a mixture of American (Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles), British (Trevor Howard and Bernard Lee), Italian (Alida Valli) and German (most of the support characters).
In fact, Welles, as the ‘third man’, does not appear until well into the narrative – his first appearance is an iconic shot – and is not on screen that much, but he steals the show, not least with a short speech that he himself wrote:
“In Italy for 30 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 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
Shot largely on location, war-ravaged, occupied Vienna – corrupted by widespread black marketing – has a starring role of its own in this black and white film full of ruin and rubble, dark streets, gloomy buildings and grotesque shadows. Reed frequently deploys sharply tilted camera angles reminiscent of the work of German Expressionism. Even the music is unusual: in the hands of Anton Karas, the zither provides a haunting backdrop as well as a memorable theme.
This week, I saw “The Third Man” in a cinema when a newly-restored version was screened for the 75th anniversary of the work.