The Third Man - Criterion Collection (2-Disc Edition)
by Carol Reed
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DVD details
Actor: Alida Valli, Ernst Deutsch, Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles, Trevor HowardDirector: Carol Reed
Brand: Image Entertainment
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language)
Format: Black & White, Dolby, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 93 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-05-22
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Criterion Collection
DVD Reviews of The Third Man - Criterion Collection (2-Disc Edition)
DVD Review: The Third Man
Summary: 5 Stars
The pq and the aq are just brilliant.Once again Criterion has cleaned and polished a classic movie.Keep up the great work Criterion.DVD Review: Amazing Camera Work
Summary: 4 Stars
I was in awe of the shots in this drama set in post WWII VIenna. There were times when I said to myself, my God, how long did it take them to set up these fleeting shots? I see that another reviewer has put this on the list of one of the 100 best films of all time. I don't quite have the frame of reference to make such a declaration. For me, constrained by my modern sensibility, I found the story line less compelling than its execution, although this is a film you can look at again and again and continually find things to marvel at.DVD Review: Not worth the money. Buy the DVD.
Summary: 1 Stars
I bought the disk expecting to be wowed by a pristine, detailed black'n'white image that blu-ray could deliver. Could... is the operative world, because this disk doesn't. The image is no better than DVD quality. It's graining and shakes in the gate. I would thought that in the least, Criterion could have stabilized the image. But alas, they didn't.
The film itself is brilliant. The best way describe the viewing experience of Criterion's edition is.... it's like watching a 16mm print on a rickety old projector, but with excellent sound.
If I could return this disk, I would.
DVD Review: One of the hundred best movies ever made.
Summary: 5 Stars
The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)
Pauline Kael once said of Citizen Kane that it was the most fun you'd ever have watching a great film. I agree with the sentiment--I'm sure everyone has at least one movie they feel that way about--but for me, its recipient has always been Carol Reed's The Third Man, one of the many fine Graham Greene adaptations that's made its way to the screen (there are some authors whose work seems almost immune from being destroyed by bad adaptations, and Greene may well be one of them; of course, it helps that he adapted this one himself). No less an august body than the BFI called The Third Man the best British film ever produced. I'm not sure I'd go that far, but I just checked my list of the hundred best movies ever made, and only three British films rank higher. (None of them, I'm sure, has ever been mentioned by the BFI in remotely the same breath as this movie; my tastes tend to diverge from the crowd somewhat. And for the record, they're Richard Eyre's Iris (#11), Alan Parker's Pink Floyd: The Wall (#33), and Harry Bromley Davenport's XTRO (#36). The Third Man sits at #38.)
Every film on my top 100 list is there for different reasons, but many of them share certain qualities. One of those is rewatchability; with very rare exceptions, it seems to me that one can't truly call a movie great if one can't imagine oneself watching it over and over again as time goes on, always deriving great pleasure from it. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen The Third Man over the years; certainly more than a dozen, probably closer to twoscore. It's a movie that has everything; a fantastic script, wonderful acting, a director and cinematographer who were both at the tops of their respective games, wonderful scenery, and, perhaps most strikingly, a rare star turn from the early career of Orson Welles in a movie he didn't direct.
If you've somehow been in a cave for the past sixty years, here's a quick rundown of the plot: Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), a hack writer, is summoned to Vienna, Austria, by his old school friend Harry Lime (Welles), who wants Martins to write some promotional materials for Lime's prescription drug business. Arriving there, however, he gets to Lime's apartment and finds out the man's just been killed in an auto accident. He manages to get to the funeral just in time, where he finds himself embroiled in a game of cat and mouse involving a couple of stiff-upper-lip British military police (Trevor Howard and Bernard Lee), Lime's beautiful girlfriend (Alida Valli), and two of Lime's shadier friends (Ernst Deutsch and Siegfried Breuer). Supposedly, the two friends were with Lime when he died, but the porter in Lime's building swears there was a third man helping to carry the body after the accident; who was the third man? And what if it wasn't an accident at all?
This is the kind of mystery that no one knows how to do any more (with the arguable exception of Hideo Nakata, whose Chaos borrows, visually, from The Third Man more than once). Reed unravels the mystery here just as much visually as he does through Martins' detective work. The viewer is expected to pay attention, to see the mystery rather than simply learning about it through the characters' conversations. What was the last Hollywood mystery you saw that did such a thing? Not that a great mystery can't be done conventionally; both The Maltese Falcon and The Usual Suspects come to mind as examples. But The Third Man is, as far as I can tell, unique in the way Reed unfolds the story; it's not enough that Graham Green wrote (and adapted) a cracking good mystery, and that the casting director staffed it with such phenomenal actors, each of whom turns in a stunning performance. It's Reed's visual language that takes this out of the realm of the good and into the realm of the spectacular. Everyone remembers Orson Welles' cuckoo clock speech, to be sure, but everyone also remembers the climactic scene with those fingers sticking out of the sewer grate; how many times have you seen it used in a movie since? It's become part of the language of film. Or Cotten standing at the base of the Ferris wheel? There's a reason is shows up in those best-movies-ever TV shows all the time; it's become iconic. But it's not just those scenes, of course. The entire movie is chock full of incredible images like this. Just rent it, put it on the DVD player, sit back, and enjoy the spectacle of the thing. And if you happen to get caught up in the engrossing story and wowed by the acting, well, that's just icing on the cake sometimes. Graham Greene could turn out a mystery like no other, and The Third Man began the golden age of Carol Reed's career (aside from collaborating once again with Greene on the other best Greene adaptation ever, Our Man in Havana, he was also responsible for such classics as Trapeze, Oliver!, and The Agony and the Ecstasy); there is almost nothing wrong with this movie at all. (The one thing that always nags me, however, is Harry Lime's first spoken lines; Welles always did have a tendency to go for the overly theatrical...) If you've never seen it, run, do not walk, to your nearest video rental store and pick a copy up. One of the hundred best films ever made. **** ?
DVD Review: Blu-ray Too Grainy
Summary: 2 Stars
I rented the Blu-ray edition. While the contrast is noticeably improved over the DVD edition, I found the graininess in the close-up shots to be too distracting.
Description of The Third Man - Criterion Collection (2-Disc Edition)
Cynical pulp novelist Holly Martins arrives in shadowy Vienna to investigate the mysterious death of his old friend, black-market opportunist Harry Lime, and thus begins an ever-thickening web of love, deception, and murder that adds up to one of cinema's most immortal treats, as well as one of its trickiest. Thanks to brilliant performances by Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, and Orson Welles; Anton Karas's timeless, evocative zither score; Graham Greene's razor-sharp dialogue; and Robert Krasker's haunting deep focus shots, off-kilter angles, and dramatic use of light and shadow, The Third Man, directed by the inimitable Carol Reed, only grows in stature as the years pass.There have been few better movies in the history of the planet than The Third Man, and fewer still as brilliantly directed from second to second. Orson Welles played the title role, and his legend has tended to engulf the film. But it was directed by Carol Reed and written--except for a Wellesian riff on the Borgias--by Graham Greene, and the credit for this masterpiece is properly theirs. Theirs and Joseph Cotten's; for awesome as Welles is, his Citizen Kane second banana is onscreen about six times as much, and Cotten uses every minute to create one of the most distinctive--if also forlorn--of modern heroes.
You know the story. Holly Martins (Cotten), a writer of pulp Westerns and one of life's congenital third-raters, arrives in post-WWII Vienna only to learn that his old pal Harry Lime, the guy who sent him his plane ticket, is being buried. Everybody, from a cynical British cop named Calloway (Trevor Howard) to Harry's Continental knockout of a girlfriend (AlidaValli) and his sundry absurd/Euro-sinister business associates, feels that Holly should get on another plane and go home. He doesn't. Things come to light. Other deaths follow. The world lies in utter ruin.
The Third Man completed a sublime hat trick--an international critical and popular smash following upon the success of Reed's Odd Man Out ('47) and The Fallen Idol ('48). Although other filmmakers had begun to use war-ravaged Europe as a great movie set, The Third Man is so vivid in its canny mix of gray semidocumentary and insanely angular, Expressionist/Surrealist chiaroscuro that it seems to have imagined not only the postwar thriller but also postwar Europe itself singlehandedly.
What great movie moments: The throwaway details like a mourner who forgets to drop his wreath on a newly dug grave. The sly editing whereby thick-headed Sergeant Paine (Bernard Lee, once and future "M" to 007) goes on leafing through a magazine, knowing just the moment he must rise and subdue the nervy Yank who would take a punch at his boss. The way Anton Karas's legendary zither score seems to jangle in the very guy-lines of a bridge where, far below Robert Krasker's Oscar-winning camera, the Third Man calls a war council. The shadow of a dead man towering, big as Europe, over the nighttime streets of Vienna. --Richard T. Jameson
Stills from The Third Man (Click for larger image)
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The fractured Europe post-World War II is perfectly captured in Carol Reed's masterpiece thriller, set in a Vienna still shell-shocked from battle. Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) is an alcoholic pulp writer come to visit his old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles). But when Cotton first arrives in Vienna, Lime's funeral is under way. From Lime's girlfriend and an occupying British officer, Martins learns of allegations of Lime's involvement in racketeering, which Martins vows to clear from his friend's reputation. As he is drawn deeper into postwar intrigue, Martins finds layer under layer of deception, which he desperately tries to sort out. Welles's long-delayed entrance in the film has become one of the hallmarks of modern cinematography, and it is just one of dozens of cockeyed camera angles that seem to mirror the off-kilter postwar society. Cotten and Welles give career-making performances, and the Anton Karas zither theme will haunt you. --Anne Hurley
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