Critics reviews

I read an interview years ago with Pedro Almodovar in which he said that when a film is really working, it seems to be dancing across the screen. "The Third Man" is a great dancer... When you think about it later... you think about the way it sounds and moves—the look and feel and rhythm of it, the way it shimmies and glides. It is, to borrow a phrase from the script, a magic lantern show, set to music.

Pristinely restored and re-released in the UK, Carol Reed's crepuscular 1949 masterwork only matures with age, its themes becoming more fragile and illusive the closer we get to it. Like Orson Welles' own Touch of Evil, to come in 1958, this is a film which does away with such cretinous inanity as offering up goodies and baddies, instead presenting its cast of characters as doing things which they believe to be good, but are not seen as such through the eyes of observers.

[It's] a peculiarly hollow, centerless blend of theatre and literature, from which what's missing, for the most part (though not entirely), is precisely the cinema. Graham Greene's script is filled with dramatic touches that Carol Reed's camera perceptively catches; but it catches them as the actors put them over from the stage, playing toward it as if it were an audience

Reed's direction and Graham Greene's screenplay reach a summit of perfection: a balloon man, a sewer chase, and an inimitable Ferris wheel confrontation—all to the sounds of the unrelenting zither.

The nocturnal world of The Third Man is the pinpoint center between prosaic and magisterial, a vision of a city still in post-wartime flux but also desperate to reclaim its pre-war serenity and beauty. The glorious look of The Third Man serves another purpose: It gives one of its supporting players, Orson Welles, one of the greatest entrances in movie history.

Similar to Vittorio De Sica's THE BICYCLE THIEF (1948) and Jean Cocteau's ORPHEUS (1950) in its semi-documentary quality, THE THIRD MAN captures Europe in ruins after the second war to end all wars... THE THIRD MAN is one of the great works of British film noir that considers what, if anything, is left of morality for those who were spared by the Second World War.

The Third Man is an exquisite work of discordant power crammed full of shifting moods. An expressionist film noir, it reveals a dark, unsettling pessimism in its ravaged night atmosphere. A jaunty, bittersweet comedy, it conveys a soulful playfulness among its likable characters. A stylistic achievement, it is a baroque composition of the absurd, a tilted wonder of visual anxiety.

Reed was sufficiently flexible to provide a significant challenge to the auteur theory. The Third Man is true to his best form, engineering a tight drama with sharply drawn characters, in a setting so delineated it might also be counted as one of the cast. It is anomalous in having received a great deal of attention worldwide, becoming in effect a "big" movie; when he purposely set about making big movies later in his career, the quality and distinctiveness fell off precipitously.

By utilizing the German-inspired visual techniques of wide shots, canted angles, jagged architecture, and expressionistic chiaroscuro lighting, directors like Reed and Wilder created an environment of spatial and moral confusion in which their pulpy narratives could take on the ethical weight of a Biblical proverb.

In its emphasis on line, in its stillness, and in its use of orthogonals receding towards a vanishing point, The Third Man's cinematography approximates the organising principles of early Renaissance perspectival painting.

Visually remarkable, very funny and still as bright and fresh as a new pin, The Third Man takes its cues from Hitchcock but then spirals off into an idiosyncratic world of comic nightmare – I've lost count of the number of times I must have seen it, but I still haven't found a flaw.

As far as I'm concerned, The Third Man is not about Orson Welles or Harry Lime or Holly Martins or postwar Vienna or the film's director, Carol Reed... In my opinion, it's about none of these things—it's about the screenwriter who wrote it, perhaps more than any other film in cinema history. That screenwriter was Graham Greene, and he was quite probably Britain's greatest postwar novelist. He was a pretty good screenwriter too. The Third Man is his cinematic masterpiece.