According to Wiki, legendary film critic Roger Ebert said, "Has there ever been a film where the music more perfectly suited the action than in Carol Reed's The Third Man? And yet recently I heard a Youtuber, one of those reactions video people, describe the music as "obnoxious", also inappropriate to the film's subject. Hmmm. Wiki also reports this: In Britain it's a thriller about friendship and betrayal. In Vienna it's a tragedy about Austria's troubled relationship with its past." Different places, different times, different people - different viewpoints. I guess that's right for a film whose protagonist attracts such wildly different characterisations and confused emotions.
It's fascinating to see post-WW2 Vienna in this movie. The sewer scenes, or some, were shot in UK at Shepperton, and probably some interior scenes. Vienna is a magnificent, surreal bomb site of a city, with a bizarre collision of nationalities and everything flipped from official to unofficial, clean to black market, or simply everything is in the grey, trying to survive and struggle on. The zither music, for me, aside from being a unique cinematic attribute, allows the movie a kind of queasy humour, as if dignified proceedings were taking place in a world of carnival and farce. Certainly there's nothing cliched about the music, nor the movie's ending (director Carol Reed had to fight to hold onto the ending as shown).
I don't think I liked this film when I was a boy. Not enough action. Maybe too much Viennese melancholy. Getting older can mean becoming freer with regard to certain things, even as one becomes fussier and habit-bound. I watch the character played by Joseph Cotton, pulp novelist Holly Martins, playing detective and wallowing in his hopeless love, with a good deal of headshaking sympathy. Looking at Alida Valli, in the role of Anna Schmidt, it's easy to see why he'd fall so hard. She's Italian, by the way, playing a Czech pretending to be Austrian (or German); anything to avoid the Russian authorities. Magnificent because, not inspite of, limited screen time, is Orson Welles as Harry Lime. This is a bit like Sir Anthony Hopkin's brief, Oscar-winning turn in The Silence of the Lambs, but with more flattering costume and lighting. British actor Trevor Howard is unrecognisable from the soppy lover in Brief Encounter, and it's nice to see Bond movie legends Bernard Lee and Geoffrey Keen in smaller roles.
The Third Man, which in case I forgot to mention is all about an American trying to investigate the shady circumstances of his shady friend's death, conveys a good deal of feeling, contained emotion, without sentimentality. Sang froid and a few doses of drunken self pity, and some low key humour, such as the scene where four nationalities of police come to arrest Anna, the Russian stern, the German demanding, the British sympathetic, the French making sure the lady doesn't forget her lipstick. The film also doesn't go in for explicitness, so, as an example, the visit to the hospital ward is neither maudlin nor grotesque, leaving the horrible results of the contaminated Penicillin to our imagination. The askew camera work also cements the image of a world rocked by a massive earthquake, WW2.
Ok, so it's a legendary classic. Wiki informs us that the BFI voted it, in 1999, the Greatest British Film. I'd never really thought of it as a British film, but then the Americans think of Game of Thrones as an American thing, despite the largely British cast, European settings and fantasy-medieval world. We don't always know who we're dealing with, do we Harry?
It's fascinating to see post-WW2 Vienna in this movie. The sewer scenes, or some, were shot in UK at Shepperton, and probably some interior scenes. Vienna is a magnificent, surreal bomb site of a city, with a bizarre collision of nationalities and everything flipped from official to unofficial, clean to black market, or simply everything is in the grey, trying to survive and struggle on. The zither music, for me, aside from being a unique cinematic attribute, allows the movie a kind of queasy humour, as if dignified proceedings were taking place in a world of carnival and farce. Certainly there's nothing cliched about the music, nor the movie's ending (director Carol Reed had to fight to hold onto the ending as shown).
I don't think I liked this film when I was a boy. Not enough action. Maybe too much Viennese melancholy. Getting older can mean becoming freer with regard to certain things, even as one becomes fussier and habit-bound. I watch the character played by Joseph Cotton, pulp novelist Holly Martins, playing detective and wallowing in his hopeless love, with a good deal of headshaking sympathy. Looking at Alida Valli, in the role of Anna Schmidt, it's easy to see why he'd fall so hard. She's Italian, by the way, playing a Czech pretending to be Austrian (or German); anything to avoid the Russian authorities. Magnificent because, not inspite of, limited screen time, is Orson Welles as Harry Lime. This is a bit like Sir Anthony Hopkin's brief, Oscar-winning turn in The Silence of the Lambs, but with more flattering costume and lighting. British actor Trevor Howard is unrecognisable from the soppy lover in Brief Encounter, and it's nice to see Bond movie legends Bernard Lee and Geoffrey Keen in smaller roles.
The Third Man, which in case I forgot to mention is all about an American trying to investigate the shady circumstances of his shady friend's death, conveys a good deal of feeling, contained emotion, without sentimentality. Sang froid and a few doses of drunken self pity, and some low key humour, such as the scene where four nationalities of police come to arrest Anna, the Russian stern, the German demanding, the British sympathetic, the French making sure the lady doesn't forget her lipstick. The film also doesn't go in for explicitness, so, as an example, the visit to the hospital ward is neither maudlin nor grotesque, leaving the horrible results of the contaminated Penicillin to our imagination. The askew camera work also cements the image of a world rocked by a massive earthquake, WW2.
Ok, so it's a legendary classic. Wiki informs us that the BFI voted it, in 1999, the Greatest British Film. I'd never really thought of it as a British film, but then the Americans think of Game of Thrones as an American thing, despite the largely British cast, European settings and fantasy-medieval world. We don't always know who we're dealing with, do we Harry?