Upon its release in 1949, Carol Reed’s atmospheric thriller The Third Maninstantly became a classic, winning the Grand Prix at Cannes, a BAFTA for Best British Film, and the Oscar for Best Cinematography for Robert Krasker. Featuring some of cinema’s most memorable set pieces and quotable lines, the film’s Viennese locations quickly etch themselves in the memory – the vast sewers, the Ferris wheel, the elegant avenues of its central cemetery. The city may have been bombed out and strewn with rubble, divided into four sectors by the Allies, but it still stood tall in all its faded grandeur.
Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), a writer of pulp Westerns, arrives in post-war Vienna on the invitation of his childhood friend Harry Lime. But on arrival he finds that Harry has recently been killed by a car whilst crossing the street, leaving a grief-stricken lover, Anna (Alida Valli). When local British investigating office Calloway (Trevor Howard) claims that Lime was an unsavoury criminal, Martins accepts an offer from a local book club to stay in Vienna in order to clear his friend’s name. As he investigates his friend’s last hours, he grows closer to the doomed Anna, and learns of an unidentified “third man” at the scene of the accident, who may hold the key to the deepening mystery surrounding Harry’s death.
The Third Man has since been acknowledged as the masterwork of many of its key players – Reed, Cotten, Welles as actor, and novelist / sometime screenwriter Graham Greene, who wrote the script holed up in the now legendary Sacher Hotel, where Martins stays in the film. Then unknown, composer Anton Karas was a musician for hire playing in the wine gardens of Vienna when Carol Reed first encountered him. He then brought Karas to London for 6 weeks to work on the soundtrack to the film and the resulting unique and melancholy zither score became a worldwide phenomenon in itself.
Extras
The Third Man: A Filmmaker’s Influence – a documentary featuring exclusive interviews with fans such as Martin Scorsese, Ben Wheatley, Hossein Amini
Restoring The Third Man
A Dangerous Edge: documentary on Graham Greene
Audio commentary with Guy Hamilton, Angela Allen and Simon Callow
Shadowing The Third Man documentary
Interview and zither performance by Cornelia Mayer
The Third Man Interactive Vienna Tour
The Third Man on the Radio
Guardian NFT Interview with Joseph Cotten (audio only)
