The Third Man

The Third Man

Opening Shot

A narrator describes postwar Vienna over newsreel footage: bombed buildings, black markets, four occupying powers carving the city into zones. The tone is sardonic, almost bored. Robert Krasker's camera tilts at Dutch angles that make the standing buildings look like they're about to fall. Then Anton Karas's zither kicks in, jaunty and out of place, and you realize the film is going to treat the ruins as a playground. Carol Reed is not making a solemn war film. He's making a thriller that happens to be set in the wreckage of civilization.

What It Does

Krasker won the Oscar for cinematography, and his work here is the definition of noir pushed to expressionist extremes. Nearly every shot is canted. Shadows stretch across cobblestones. The sewer chase, shot in actual Viennese sewers, uses the curved walls and running water to create a geography that feels both claustrophobic and endless. Krasker understood that postwar Vienna was already a noir set. He just had to light it.

Karas's zither score is the most unlikely sonic choice in film history, and it's perfect. A single instrument, plucking a melody that's simultaneously cheerful and sinister, playing over scenes of betrayal, murder, and moral collapse. The music gives the film its distinctive tone: a world where terrible things happen and the city shrugs. The zither doesn't mourn. It keeps playing.

Orson Welles appears for maybe twenty minutes total and steals the entire film. His entrance, lit by a window light that catches a cat at his feet before revealing his face and that grin, is the most choreographed character introduction in cinema. The Ferris wheel speech (the famous "cuckoo clock" line, which Welles improvised) is Harry Lime's philosophy compressed: people are dots from above, and dots don't have feelings. Welles plays it with such charm that you almost agree, which is Reed's entire point.

Why It's on the List

The Third Man is the tightest thriller ever made, a film where every scene serves the plot and every composition serves the theme. Carol Reed took Graham Greene's screenplay and turned it into an argument about what happens when charm becomes an alibi for evil. Holly Martins wants his friend to be innocent. The film won't let him have it. It's also a document of a specific historical moment (occupied Vienna, the penicillin racket, the moral chaos of postwar Europe) that no other film captures with this precision.

The Argument Against

Joseph Cotten's Holly Martins is the film's weakest element. He's written as a naive American, and Cotten plays the naivety so thoroughly that he sometimes feels passive when the film needs him to drive the action. The love story between Holly and Anna (Alida Valli) generates less heat than the screenplay requires, which makes the famous final shot technically perfect but emotionally dependent on investment the film hasn't fully earned in that relationship.

Closing Image

Holly waits on a road lined with bare trees. Anna walks toward him from the cemetery where they've just buried Harry Lime. She walks the entire length of the road. The camera holds. Holly waits. She passes him without looking, without slowing. The zither plays. She walks out of frame. He stands alone. The leaves fall. Nothing has been resolved except the mystery, and the mystery was always the least important thing.