Movie #: 17 Title: The Third Man 1949

Rating: 9.50

Director (last): REED (first): CAROL

Writer (last): GREENE (first): GRAHAM

How much can a film owe to its score? Zither music sets tone and atmosphere for this haunting, affecting work. Touches you somewhere deep, cold, and chilling. One of the most haunting scenes of any movie: Lime's funeral, when his girl walks away from everyone, but especially Holly Martins. Holly Martins is an American writer. He creates westerns, slick entertainments designed to sell. When he gets a message from old school chum Harry Lime, to come to Vienna, he does so in a hurry. Unfortunately, he arrives only in time to attend Lime's funeral: he has been killed in a car accident. Martins is beside himself with a grief, though a British military officer tells him that Lime was into the black market. Martins can't believe it. He begins to suspect foul play. He plunges into a foolhardy investigation, but makes a shocking discovery. The real story is Martin's discovery of the unpleasant realities that govern life in post-war Vienna, the conditions that created a black market, and the nature of Lime's relationships. In a real sense, Martins' stands in for naive, well-meaning, but sometimes foolish America, plunging into Europe with black & white notions of good and evil, and in for a reckoning from the complexities of life under Nazi and Soviet rule. Martins resists these revelations until it is almost too late. And even then, he gives in to a foolish romantic impulse that results in disaster. And, of course, there is that famous scene in the ferris wheel: Lime looks down on the people below and compares them to ants-- what are they to you and I, he asks.

Is this movie a "gem"? No

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Added: 1980-01-01 [yyyy-mm-dd]