Now that the summer movie blitz is winding down and the new release schedule more closely resembles a calendar of events at an insane asylum than a docket of fine film (if it ever did), it’s nice to dive deep into the local video library and rent something never seen before.
In “The Third Man,” released in 1949, Joseph Cotten stars as Holly Martins, an out-of-work American writer who has just arrived in post-World War II Vienna, Austria, to start a job set up by his friend, Harry Lime, played to perfection by Orson Welles. Martins arrives at Lime’s apartment and learns that his friend has just died mysteriously when a truck hit him while he was walking across the street. After Lime’s funeral, Martins gets picked up by a major in the British Army, who asks some tough questions about Lime. Turns out Lime was heavy into the raging black-market scene that was plaguing Vienna after the Allies divided it up into sections after the war, consequently
cutting off supply lines to the city.
Martins at first refuses to believe his best friend was breaking the law, instead investigating Lime’s death on his own after he learns that an unknown third man was present after the accident. Martins, who has no investigative experience, seeks this third man with the help of Lime’s distraught girlfriend, Anna (Alida Valli). As director Carol Reed slowly unfurls the mystery, Lime’s dealings become more and more questionable while the intentions of the various individuals he had contact with before his death become more suspect. The script, written by Graham Greene, the English author who wrote, among many books, “The Quiet American” and “The Power and the Glory,” moves the mystery along slowly, giving the audience pieces of the puzzle without making the solution obvious. And when the mystery of the third man is finally solved, the film changes gears and turns into a thriller, ending with a chase-sequence fraught with tension.
It’s no wonder the film topped the list of the British Film Institute’s 100 best films of all-time – the acting, direction and script are all superb. The American Film Institute’s No. 1 film, incidentally, is “Citizen Kane.” Both star Welles and Cotten.
While Welles’ role in “The Third Man” is relatively short on screen time, he steals the scenes he’s in. Known primarily for writing and directing, Welles was one of America’s finest actors for more than 40 years, and he shows it in this film. But he made his contribution as a writer, too. The DVD features a letter Greene wrote about the development of the movie in which he mentions that Welles’ famous quote from the film – “In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed – they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” – was actually Welles’ input to the script.
The movie is truly worthy of the title “classic,” but it stands on its own after the test of time, a finely crafted mystery that leaves the audience guessing and, more importantly,
intrigued until the final climactic scene.