Carol Reed's post-war Vienna thriller. Anton Karas's zither, Orson Welles's Harry Lime, and one of the most-respected genre pieces ever shot.
Vienna, 1949. The city is divided into four occupation zones (American, British, French, Soviet). Holly Martins, an American pulp-novelist, arrives in the city at the invitation of his friend Harry Lime, who has offered him a job. Holly discovers on arrival that Harry has died — hit by a truck outside his apartment, with his body witnessed by his manservant and two friends. The British military police (in the person of Major Calloway) inform Holly that Harry was running a black-market penicillin operation that was killing children.
Holly refuses to accept the official story. He investigates the death. He discovers a third man was at the scene of the accident. He learns the third man was Harry himself — alive, faking his own death, hiding from the British authorities. The film closes with Harry's actual death in the Vienna sewers and Holly's attendance at his real funeral.
The Third Man was made by the Korda brothers' London Films and shot extensively on location in actual post-war Vienna in late 1948 — the bombed-out streets, the still-functional buildings of the city's centre, the Prater Ferris wheel, the actual sewer system. The verisimilitude is the foundation of the film's power. Cinematographer Robert Krasker's tilted-camera compositions (often called 'Dutch angles') and high-contrast black-and-white photography became one of the most-imitated visual styles in subsequent noir.
The film is, structurally, a British view of post-war Europe — Graham Greene's screenplay, Carol Reed's direction, Anton Karas's specifically-Viennese zither score. The Americans on screen (Holly, Harry) are observed from outside; the film does not identify with them. The moral judgments are British. This is, in some sense, the film's contribution to the noir tradition: a non-American take on what the same period American noir was processing about post-war moral disorientation.
The most-discussed scene in the film is the Ferris-wheel encounter between Holly and the still-living Harry. Welles delivers a roughly three-minute monologue defending his black-market operation in cosmic terms: people are dots from this height, and what does it matter if some dots stop moving in exchange for personal freedom? The monologue closes with the famous cuckoo-clock speech: 'In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed — they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace — and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.'
The lines were written by Welles himself, not by Graham Greene. Welles reportedly delivered them with minimal direction; Reed kept the first take. The speech is now widely quoted, often by people who don't quite understand the irony Reed and Welles intended — the speech is the villain's rationalisation, not the film's argument. The film's actual moral position is that Harry's view is monstrous and that Holly is right to inform on him. The cuckoo-clock speech is the seductive surface of evil, not its defence.
The film's score is performed entirely on a single zither — a traditional Central European stringed instrument — by Anton Karas, an Austrian musician Carol Reed reportedly discovered playing in a Viennese restaurant during pre-production. The score is one of the most-recognisable in any post-war film. The main theme spent eleven weeks at number one on the U.S. Billboard chart in 1950.
The choice of a single zither for an entire feature-length score was, in 1949, structurally unusual. Most studio films had full orchestral scores. The zither's specific Central European associations also nail the film to a place in a way an orchestral score would not have. Reed has spoken about the score across his career as the single most-important creative decision he made on the film.