The Third Man is one of those rare films that captured its audience immediately and was regarded as a classic almost from its first release. It marks one of those unusual conjunctions of script, director, subject, cast and setting -- and, of course, music -- in which everything meshes. Graham Greene's script, based on his novel, is a brilliant evocation of the urban battleground of good and evil, with just the right proportions of drama, atmosphere, action, rich character and tense construction. The acting ensemble is superb with the mixture of Americans and Europeans in the cast creating an ideal balance: Trevor Howard as the pragmatic and brutally unsparing Calloway; Bernard Lee as the gentle Sergeant Paine; Wilfred Hyde-White as Crabbin, the slightly addled literary entrepreneur; Ernst Deutsch as the sinister, ferrety "Baron" Kurtz; Alida Valli, exuding fatalistic romance as Anna; and those two refugees from Citizen Kane, Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten, as the two old friends torn asunder, the dark side and the light, Harry and Holly -- their names so similar Anna often confuses them. Welles' relatively brief performance is perfection itself: the bemused, lightly condescending, affectionate look with which he greets Holly; the murderous fluency of his Machiavellian story of the cuckoo clock (which he wrote); or the wild desperation as he flounders in the sewer. This is magnificent, highly charged film acting.

Because the two great setpieces in The Third Man -- the ferris wheel confrontation and the chase through the sewers -- both revolve around Welles, and because they're shot with the kind of weirdly angled grandiloquence and impudent virtuosity for which he's noted, there's been a temptation to believe that he directed them. Invaluable as Welles' contributions and performance were, the directorial triumph is Reed's. He is the hero, and dominating influence -- insisting that it be shot in Vienna; insisting that Welles play Harry Lime over distributor David Selznick's forceful nomination of Noel Coward; resisting Selznick's usual indefatigable memos and attempted "Americanization" of the script; discovering Anton Karas and his zither in a tiny beer-and-sausage restaurant (the "Third Man Theme" became a major hit record of its day); and finally, rejecting even Graham Greene's suggestion of a climatic rapprochement between Anna and Holly. (Ironically, there is a famous moment in Welles' performance which is Reed's too: Harry Lime's hands, reaching desperately through the sewer grating, fingers flailing in the windy night air, actually belong to a stand-in -- the director.)

Yet, perhaps Carol Reed took too seriously the suggestion that Welles' hand lay heavy somewhere in Third Man. He never again caught the peculiar and vibrant visual stylizations, the special "look" which makes this film and the earlier Odd Man Out such a stunning experience. (William Wyler, after watching the film, presented Reed with a spirit level, to place on his camera next time, forcibly preventing any angle shots.) This was the one time Reed, as a director, reached perfection; and he did it as much by assembling and marshalling a brilliantly talented company as by the power of his own vision. Together he and Greene -- and Welles, Cotten, Howard, Valli, Karas, Krasker, Korda and all the others -- created a portrait of postwar corruption and the death of idealism, that has lodged ever since in our collective consciousness. Together, they made a rich, moody masterpiece of guilt, love, and ambivalent redemption.
-- MICHAEL WILMINGTON

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