Better
with Age
THE
THIRD MAN
Forget Casablanca. This is the romantic thriller to see.
With Joseph Cotton, Alida Valli, Orson Welles
Written by Graham Greene
Directed by Carol Reed
OF THE MYRIAD THINGS TO RELISH in The Third Man - Carol Reed's breathtakingly good 1949 romantic thriller - the first thing is the music.
The movie opens with a closeup image of a zither, its strings moving in rhythm to Anton Karas' "Third Man Theme," which became as famous as the movie itself. The music sounds crisp and lively at the start. But before the drama ends, Karas will play variations on his unforgettable tune, some of them wailing and melancholy, some mocking and ironic.
Almost immediately we meet Holly Martins - portrayed by Joseph Cotton in an exquisitely nuanced performance - who steps off the trolley in Vienna, "happy as a lark and without a cent." He's there to work for his old friend Harry Lime. But poor Harry is dead - hit by a car just a few days ago in front of the apartment where he lived, and carried away by two friends who witnessed the tragedy.
Or was it three friends? The police say no, but the Austrian porter at Harry's apartment building says yes. So Holly sets out to find the third man.
In doing so he encounters a gallery of rogues in perilous, avaricious post-war Vienna: The effete "Baron" Kurtz (Ernst Deutsch), who carries a little dog with him and plays violin at the Casanova Club ("one has to work the best way one can"); the taciturn British officer (Trevor Howard), who slaps Holly around and warns him not to get involved in Harry's sordid life; and Anna (Alida Valli), Harry's lover, who sees no reason to care about living any longer now that Harry is dead.
In Holly and Anna - he a naive idealist, she an icy realist - writer Graham Greene creates two of his most complex romantic casualties. Holly writes junky Western novels for grownup boys and "falls in love with girls." Anna is his heartsick foil: Now that Harry is gone, she talks of death or lunch with the same indifference. Anna utters the movie's most telling romantic line and among many. If you've ever been in love, you'll know it when you hear it.
Beyond its jaded romanticism, The Third Man is rather a cynical film: It's largely the story of a decent sap who discovers that his friend - in the moral rubble of bombed-about Europe - broke faith with their ideals. It strikes an unparalleled balance between the tragic and the parodic, coyly deconstructing its own genre as it goes along. Reed captures a shimmering visual panorama of Vienna just after the war, and Greene concocts a comic subplot about a British propaganda officer (Wilfrid Hyde-White) who - never having read Holly's books - comes to believe Holly is a distinguished American writer.
See The Third Man and savor every image, sound and performance, as well as Reed's immaculate and sometimes quirky direction. It's as close to perfect as the cinema gets, more refined and satisfying than Casablanca, with a celebrated final image that's even more resonant. It's good to have it back, still fresh and exhilarating after 50 years.