The Third Man (1949)

Official trailer

The Third Man is Carol Reed’s 1949 British noir thriller set in post-war Vienna. The film depicts pulp novelist Holly Martins arriving in occupied Vienna to take a job offered by his old friend Harry Lime, only to learn Lime has been killed in a street accident. Martins investigates the death and discovers that Lime faked his own funeral and is involved in penicillin racketeering that’s killed children. Joseph Cotten plays Martins. Orson Welles plays Lime in his famous late-arriving role. Alida Valli plays Lime’s lover Anna Schmidt.

Trevor Howard plays British military police officer Major Calloway. Graham Greene wrote the screenplay. Anton Karas performs the score entirely on solo zither.

London Films and the Selznick Company produced the film on a budget of approximately 500,000 pounds, and it grossed approximately 30 million dollars worldwide. The film won the Grand Prize at the 1949 Cannes Film Festival.

I can’t name a film closer to perfect than The Third Man. That zither, that doorway and that last walk past Martins are scenes I carry around with me, and the whole picture has a sour, clever, broken-hearted mood nobody has matched since.

The film is one of the defining works of British cinema and to my mind the strongest film noir produced outside the United States. The Reed direction combines location shooting in actual bombed Vienna with expressionist visual technique that exceeds what conventional noir productions attempted.

The Karas zither score creates one of cinema’s most distinctive audio signatures. The Welles performance arrives forty-five minutes into the runtime and is among the most famous late entries in film history.

The Ferris wheel scene contains a speech Welles wrote himself that’s acquired cultural reference exceeding the film’s other elements. Each piece makes the others better.

The Karas Score

Reed encountered Anton Karas playing zither in a Vienna restaurant during pre-production research. Karas was a local musician with no film experience. Reed hired him to compose and perform the entire score on solo zither. The decision was unconventional. Major productions used full orchestras. Solo zither was a folk instrument tied to Austrian peasant music instead of international thrillers.

The score ranks among the most recognizable in cinema history. The Harry Lime Theme reached number one on the Billboard charts in 1950.

Karas went from restaurant musician to international concert performer. The score gave the film a sound nothing else had. Later thrillers tried similar single-instrument approaches without matching the Third Man result. The Karas score showed that one performer with the right instrument could produce stronger scoring than full orchestral commission.

That score delights me. A single zither plinking away over bombed-out Vienna sounds wrong on paper, cheerful and a little drunk, and on screen it makes every scene feel like a joke someone is telling at a funeral.

Welles as Lime

Welles appears at minute forty-five and remains on screen for less than ten minutes total.

The reveal occurs in a doorway when a cat brushes against Welles’s shoes and a passing light catches his face. The sequence is constructed for maximum impact after the audience has spent most of the runtime hearing about Lime without seeing him. It made Welles’s brief screen time more powerful than extensive presence would have been.

Welles wrote the famous cuckoo clock speech himself. The speech makes the case that the Borgias produced the Renaissance while peaceful Switzerland produced only the cuckoo clock. The argument is historically wrong. The cuckoo clock was a Black Forest German invention. The speech remains memorable despite the factual error because Welles delivered it with the conviction the actual case didn’t require. Welles understood that performance can carry arguments that factual accuracy can’t.

It tickles me that the cuckoo clock speech is wrong and it doesn’t matter one bit. Welles tosses it off on the Ferris wheel like a man who’s never once doubted himself, and that smugness tells me everything I need to know about Harry Lime.

The Vienna Setting

Reed filmed in actual post-war Vienna while the city was still divided into American, British, French, and Soviet occupation zones.

The bombed buildings, the rubble piles, the curfew signs, and the four-power patrols are documentary footage. The setting gives the film authenticity that studio reconstruction couldn’t have provided. The location captures one historical moment that closed within years of the film.

The closing sewer chase occurs in the actual Vienna sewer system. Reed shot the sequence on location in tunnels still being used as escape routes by black market operators during production.

The cinematography by Robert Krasker uses extreme angles, deep shadows, and water reflections that have influenced every later sewer chase in cinema. Krasker won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography. The Vienna location is itself a character in the film.

The sewer chase is where I’d point anyone who doubts that black-and-white photography can be thrilling. Those tilted angles and wet shadows make Lime look like a rat running out of tunnel, and I can’t take my eyes off it.

Does The Third Man still hold up?

The Third Man gets a 10 from me with no complaints. The zither score gives it a sound no other thriller has matched, Welles makes less than ten minutes of screen time feel like the whole film, and the ruins of Vienna capture a moment that vanished within a few years. Add Reed’s refusal to give Greene his romantic ending, and you’ve got the strongest noir anyone made outside the United States.

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