The Third Man  (PG) |Close-Up Film Review

1st September marked the 75th anniversary of this classic film from director Carol Reed and writer Graham Green, which was first screened in a small cinema in Hastings in 1949.   The Third Man, hailed as a masterpiece of cinema, has now been restored into a digital high resolution format ready to be seen by a new audience on the big screen, before being released in a 4K UKH 75th Anniversary collector’s edition later in the autumn.

When I first saw the film many years ago, my concentration was understandably on the story.  It’s set in post war Vienna, which was at that time divided among the Allied powers – Britain, France and Russia.  Pulp fiction novelist Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) arrives in the city at the invitation of his old friend Harry Lime.  But Harry Lime, he is told, is dead.  Holly attends his funeral, where he meets Harry’s former girlfriend, the beautiful Anna (Alida Valli) with whom he soon falls in love.   He also comes up against British officer Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), who is policing the British sector and is investigating the late Lime’s suspicious activities.   And of course, famously, Harry (Orson Welles) isn’t dead at all.  

A return viewing of the film however gives another chance to fully appreciate the totally stunning,  expressionist style black and white camera work which won cinematographer Robert Krasker an Oscar.  The tilted angles on the beautiful but war scarred city and the often disturbing close ups of the characters Holly encounters in his search – the feeling of menace from a balloon seller, close ups of bizarre faces such as that of Baron Kurtz (Ernst Deutsch), reminiscent  to us now of the later character of the MC in Cabaret.   Even the small boy playing ball looks like he could be an imp from the sewer below the city.  And of course one of the best and most famous visual introductions to a character ever – the cat licking the shoes of a man in a shop doorway, then the light from a window shows us the blandly good looking, smirking face of Welles as the very much alive Harry Lime. 

Angela Allen was only 19 years old when she was flown out to Vienna to act as second unit continuity girl on the film (a job now known as script supervisor in these less sexist times).   She is now one of the few, probably the only person who worked on the film and is still alive.  She recalls that Orson, the big star, could sometimes be as elusive during filming as Harry Lime himself.

Much of the latter part of the film is shot in the surprisingly clean sewers under Vienna.   But Welles flatly refused to go down that sewer – which must have made the final chase sequence tricky to film.   Part of that is a memorable  shot of Harry’s fingers grasping at air through a sewer grid, as he desperately tries to escape his pursuers.  But that’s actually the hand of the film’s assistant director, Guy Hamilton, a man who later directed several of the James Bond movies. 

I hope the producers of this gleaming new print have had the forethought to record an interview with Ms Allen for that Anniversary Collector’s Edition, when it come out.  She is living film history

The 75th anniversary edition of  THE THIRD MAN will be available to own on 4K UHD for the first time ever on 4 November.