Written by eminent English novelist Graham Greene, The Third Man (1949) by director Carol Reed combines crime, mystery, and tragedy into a fine blend of noir.
The protagonist Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) is an American novelist, who arrives in post-WW2 Vienna upon the invitation of his friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles), only to learn that Lime has died in a road accident. As he attends the funeral, he meets Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli), Lime’s former lover, and quite a few other characters. Martins soon comes to suspect whether foul play was involved in Lime’s death and the shadowy affairs of Lime’s secret life.
The Third Man has everything a noir fan would look for – engaging mystery, compelling scenes with surprise turns, interesting characters on the run, and top-notch cinematography. The latter stands out in nearly every scene of the movie from the beginning to the end, both in setting and character shades. The setting adds immensely to the course of the story and the dilemma of its characters. A city divided and occupied by different political authorities that makes it unsafe for the characters to walk around freely complements the personal confines of each character. The changing shades of the main characters against this split in the physical space add an invisible layer of vulnerability to the people in the story.
Betrayal causing a crushing loss of trust is business as usual in classic noir. The Third Man employs this element in full force to damage the characters to their core. From the disillusioned Martins to the devastated Anna and dead Harry, the story puts loads of darkness in the human character, showing the painful vulnerability of the spirit. Anna’s character is the most broken one at the end as she can’t seem to move on from the loss of the man she thought she could trust with her life.
Reed’s The Third Man remains yet another example of the noir genre exceling in the 1940s. A must see for Noir fans!
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