Director: Carol Reed
Cast: Joseph Cotton, Alida Valli, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard, Bernard Lee
Release Date: 1st September 1949
Trailer:
IMDb Rating: 8.1
Academy Awards: Best Cinematography (Black and White)
Academy Award Nominations: Best Director, Best Film Editing
What the Critics said:
” “The Third Man,” for all the awesome hoopla it has received, is essentially a first-rate contrivance in the way of melodrama—and that’s all. It isn’t a penetrating study of any European problem of the day (except that it skirts around black-markets and the sinister anomalies of “zones”). It doesn’t present any “message.” It hasn’t a point of view. It is just a bang-up melodrama, designed to excite and entertain. In the light of the buzz about it, this is something we feel you should know. Once it is understood clearly, there is no need for further asides. For into this strangely off-beat story of a young American visitor’s attempts to get to the bottom of the mystery of a friend’s dubious “death” in Vienna’s streets, Mr. Reed has brilliantly packaged the whole bag of his cinematic tricks, his whole range of inventive genius for making the camera expound. His eminent gifts for compressing a wealth of suggestion in single shots, for building up agonized tension and popping surprises are fully exercised. His devilishly mischievous humor also runs lightly through the film, touching the darker depressions with little glints of the gay or macabre.To be sure, Mr. Greene has contributed conspicuously to the job with a script that is cleverly constructed and pungently laced with dialogue. […] This eerie and mesmerizing music, which is rhythmic and passionate and sad, becomes, indeed, the commentator—the genius loci—of the Viennese scene. Pulsing with hopefulness and longing with “menace” and poignance and love, it thoroughly completes the illusions of a swift and intriguing romance.” Bosley Crowther, The New York Times, February 3rd 1950
“The Third Man (Sir Alexander Korda; David O. Selznick) is already a smash hit in Britain, where most critics hailed it as the best movie of 1949. U.S. moviegoers are likely to find it one of the best of 1950. Set and filmed in a forlorn, postwar Vienna, The Third Man is crammed with cinematic plums that would do the early Hitchcock proud—ingenious twists and turns of plot, subtle detail, full-bodied bit characters, atmospheric backgrounds that become an intrinsic part of the story, a deft commingling of the sinister with the ludicrous, the casual with the bizarre. But the central characters are not mere pawns in a melodrama; they are motivated people who speak grown-up dialogue and feel contagious emotions. The film’s most original touch: a unique musical sound track using only a hauntingly twanging zither which speaks more tellingly than a full symphony orchestra. In Director Reed’s hands, a shot of a body floating in the Danube tells a story of its own, a shot of a cat licking a man’s shoe becomes a chilling premonition of shock. Reed gets a grotesquely comic sequence out of an eerie four-year-old boy leading a street crowd in pursuit of Gotten while the accompanying zither jangles like a nickelodeon piano. At every turn, he exploits the hulking shadows and wet, back-lighted cobblestones of Vienna at night. Cameraman Robert (Odd Man Out) Krasker gives beautiful expression to Reed’s photogenic tricks, e.g., as a train chugs out of the station, nothing is seen but the light patterns of its windows projected across a cloud of steam.” No Author, TIME Magazine, 6th February 1950
The IFG Ratings:
Dominik
Razvan
Donnie
Arpatilaos
Paul
Rob
4Porcelli
IFG Average Rating: 8.36
REMINDERS:
By Friday 6th December: Send me your list of your favourite 50 films of all time for the Annual Poll: The annual end of year IFG Favourite Films of All Time poll
Also by Friday 6th December: Send me your nominations for the next monthly film so I can create a poll to decide the films for January, February and March.
The Review Poll has now been closed. Please see the results here: The IFG Review Poll and be sure to read the update at the bottom of the page.
Oasis of Fear 