The Third Man

Frequently named the greatest British movie of all time, The Third Man is a great movie that constantly keeps you guessing. It’s a film noir, though it absolutely doesn’t feel like one; it has this brilliantly light, cheeky zither soundtrack that makes the whole thing seem like a giant prank played on Joseph Cotten’s Holly Martins, who is in post-war Vienna to meet his friend Harry Lime, who promised him a job. When he gets there he finds Lime is dead, though SPOLIER ALERT: he’s not dead and he’s Orson Welles. He suspects Lime was murdered and is trying to track down ‘the third man’, a supposed witness to Lime’s death that no one can identify. The thing is with such a massive name in the movie and all this tension building up over who this third man is, I can’t imagine audiences being at all surprised when Orson Welles’ giant, smug face is finally illuminated. I mean his name is in the trailer but he himself doesn’t appear. Still, for me, like most film noir, the mystery is secondary to watching the protagonist react to its unfolding, and Cotten’s performance in this is really funny. Well not like, Will Ferrell funny, more like 1949 reserved banter rib ticklery. He’s a writer of cheap novelettes, not a detective, and instead of detecting, he quips his way to the heart of the mystery in a largely passive role as the story unfolds around him. ‘Happy as a lark and without a cent’. It’s worth noting that I saw this in the cinema in 4K. It looked fantastic when I was trying to notice it, but my experience was pretty much the same as when I saw last year in the cinema for University, and I think that was on DVD. I’d definitely recommend going to see it though.