The Third Man Essay

Cara Murray
Film Review
“The Third Man”, 1949

While traveling abroad in Europe, I took the opportunity one evening to watch “The Third Man”, the most famous classic British noir from 1949. The film was directed by Carol Reed and starred Joseph Cotton as Holly Martins, Orson Welles as Harry Lime, and Alida Valli as femme fatale Anna Schmidt.

Set in Vienna after WWII, the city is divided into zones controlled by the occupying forces when Holly Martins arrives from the US to take a job with a good friend from his school days, Harry Lime. After being in the city for what appeared to the viewer as less than 3 minutes, he was informed that his friend had been the victim of a car accident out in front of his own home and had died. Over the next

From the first note of the theme song during the opening credits, the viewer encounters the sounds of a zither, similar to a guitar. Anton Karas, the composer of the entirely zither soundtrack, was at the time an unknown artist. Reed heard him playing at a wine bar and got him to agree to compose the score. The music was often eerie or haunting, fitting with the anticipation of a noir and post-war Vienna, but it honestly gave life to the film, which sometimes felt flat. With the inundation of crime and thriller films being produced today, the viewer doesn’t feel the type of “edge of your seat” suspense that many modern day films are able to produce. As for the cinematography, many of the scenes of the film were shot at awkward angles. It was as if the camera wasn’t set up straight, but too much of an angle that it had to have been intentional. The black and white expressionist cinematography by Robert Krasker has been hailed as a critical aspect of the films’ style. At times it added to the drama of a scene, however, at other points it became overly distracting. The famous chase through the underground tunnels with the echoes disguising the location of the officers was an instance where the titled camera added to the drama of the