Carol Reed

Carol Reed’s ‘The Third Man’ Turns 75

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The Third Man debuted 75 years ago and even though he didn’t write, direct, or play the starring role, his performance as Harry Lime nevertheless makes it

By Matt Hansen | Sept 2025

The Third Man debuted 75 years ago and even though he didn’t write, direct, or play the starring role, his performance as Harry Lime nevertheless makes it feel like an Orson Welles movie. It’s unfortunate that the focus falls so squarely on him, since a stellar crew were involved in making it. The screenplay was written by Graham Greene based on his original story, with Sir Carol Reed sitting in the director’s chair, and it stars the underrated Joseph Cotton, who appeared in several of the great director’s best films, including Citizen Kane. Welles dominates the movie because his natural charm and devilish charisma are a perfect fit for what the movie understands about the mendacity of disaster.

Sir Carol Reed

We’re in post-WWII Vienna and everything is askew. The grand, cultivated city has been ravaged by war and fascism and economic collapse. The streets are carved up into officially designated Russian, German, and English sectors. People are scrounging to survive, the black market is bustling, and everyone is on the take. Reed expertly depicts the moral and social chaos: expressionistic camera shots are tilted at a dizzying “Dutch angle” which enhances the paranoia and claustrophobia. The film’s pacing has an anxious rhythm as various characters negotiate their legal and moral fates. Anton Karas’ deceptively jaunty theme and spine-tingling zither soundtrack is legendary. Even though it’s shot without color, even incorporating actual footage from the postwar Viennese streets, the morality of the situation is anything but black and white.

Enter Joseph Cotton’s naïve American Holly Martens, a writer of pulp westerns who is in town for a job promised by his old friend Harry Lime. Martens is a good guy though it’s immediately clear that he’s in over his head. Lime has apparently died in a freak car accident, which understandably shakes Martens up, though, given the sardonic expressions on the faces of those who tell him the news, there’s something else going on with his enigmatic old friend. He wants to defend his friend’s honor until he finds out what he was really doing. It turns out that Lime was swiping penicillin from the government, watering it down, and selling it at a marked-up rate to hospitals on the black market. Apparently selling bogus penicillin is especially cruel because it makes the patient immune to future doses of the real drug. Lime has both figuratively and literally been making a killing — including children with meningitis. As the wry English Officer Calloway puts it: “the lucky ones died.”

Five years after the outbreak of the pandemic, Lime’s ruthless opportunism doesn’t seem dated. Award-winning investigative reporter J David McSwane, author of the lively Pandemic, Inc: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick wrote that “a global scarcity of masks created an unregulated market that grew as the Trump administration left states and hospitals to fend for themselves in bidding wars that drove up prices.”

McSwane quotes one hustling wannabe broker of stockpiled M94 masks, wheeling and dealing with the VA midflight about masks he doesn’t even have access to:

“it’s a bunch of buccaneers and pirates! But so were the men who made America. You’re gonna have a lot of millionaires that come out of this. They’re just scoundrels. You have this black market. When the cat’s away the mice will play.”

True indeed. And, though we have not gotten better, nor have we  gotten worse with time; evidently the film’s penicillin based plot point had a real life basis.

The scene when Martens discovers that Lime is indeed very much alive is one of the great entrances in movie history. A cat curls up to a well-dressed leg in a darkened doorway as light from a window suddenly shines across Welles’ face which alternately flickers with bemusement, arrogance, and playful nonchalance. Iconic movie reviewer Roger Ebert named it the very moment when he was “lost to the movies” and crooned that The Third Man “embodies the romance of the movies.” It’s easy to see why. Great skill both behind and in front of the camera is required to make us gasp when we see Lime, especially given that we know what a louse he truly is.

When the old friends finally stand face-to-face, they are standing on a Ferris Wheel, which provides both a reasonable spot for a private chat with a fugitive and a great metaphor for the coldly distant attitude Lime has on the rest of the world. This very short scene is a masterclass in minimalism; Lime’s genuinely happy to see his old friend, pleased at his own cunning, sizing up whether his old pal Martens is considering killing him or being killed by him, and cagily tries to appeal to both Marten’s conscience and his cynicism.

At one point he tells Martens to look down at the tiny people milling around far below and frankly asks if he would really care if one of those dots suddenly stopped moving. The reasonable delivery of Lime’s nihilism is chilling. Of course, you know what he means — we pass strangers down on their luck or hear about X number of people who died on the news pretty much every day and barely give it a second thought. Stalin famously said that “one death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.” The mass murderer was utterly wrong. Each statistic represents a million specific tragedies. Yet you can’t help but notice how power creates callousness, how easy it is to disengage from the reality of other people’s lives, and how elites of any kind can easily mistake the people beneath them as no more than dollar signs, lines on a chart, numbers on a page, consumers of an algorithm.

Lime finishes, naturally, with a grandiose rhetorical flourish. He chides Martens for being “gloomy” and quotes an undefined source about how “in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonard Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace — and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” He really sells the comedy in that last sentence. Putting aside whether this is historically accurate, the more you think about the implications the more ridiculous and downright diabolical they become.

What’s he even saying? To take life by the horns? You’ve got to break eggs to make an omelet? Therefore, it’s ok to get rich from prolonging the misery of already helpless and suffering people because at least you have the balls to get yours, no matter who is affected in the process? I’m sure I don’t have to point out where we all might have heard that mentality expressed, both on screen and off. You hear different characters say things like that in the movies all the time and one attribute of today’s world is that it sure seems like life is imitating art. The way that Reed and Welles tell it though, is nonpareil – as the Guardian notes, the film is “near-perfect.”

 

It’s Harry’s swagger, the confidence, the bravado that sells it. Almost. Welles is clearly relishing playing the bad guy, and not for the first or last time in his career. He knows how Lime really enjoys being himself, a very seductive quality. Which makes him a warning. We see throughout the film how even his girlfriend. played with alluring reserve by the lovely Adia Valli, knows he’s terrible and still loves him. Martens, the kindly schmuck, falls for her and she’s having none of it. It’s Harry Lime who they both reminisce about, puzzle over, and who makes the most lasting impact. Like the movie characters, audiences wanted more: there was a spinoff radio series about Lime, played by Welles, and comic books and TV series. I won’t give away the ending, but there’s a heartbreakingly vivid demonstration (using a Van Gogh reference) of how even if a person is proven to be a monster, it’s not always enough to break their hold on those who love them.

 

Source: Carol Reed’s ‘The Third Man’ Turns 75 – Book and Film Globe

Old British Films, Boring? Pshaw!

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The passage of time tends to make old films more interesting, such as these seven films of the late ’40s and ’50s from British directors John Boulting, Carol Reed, David Lean, Anthony Kimmins, Charles Frend, Guy Hamilton, and Leslie Norman.

By Michael Barrett

Boring British Movies

Growing up as a callow nascent film buff, lost in the candy store of VHS tapes and TV Guide, I gathered that British films were mostly dull old things. With a few exceptions, they were talky sub-Hollywood productions, at best well-acted but lacking oomph and pizzazz and élan and je ne sais quoi. I partly got this impression from English critics, and some of the tatty VHS and TV prints I saw reinforced this idea.

As the years passed, I had to note more and more exceptions until the old canard became festooned with mental asterisks and parentheses. Today, with so many classic British films that haven’t circulated in the US finally hitting Region 1 in sparkling restorations on Blu-ray, I’m officially concluding that the spotty dismissal of British cinema is what deserves to be dismissed.

I believe three factors have been at work in promoting this fiction about boring English films. The first is that critics and reviewers everywhere seem to be blind to the qualities of their own country’s film production. This partly explains why English critics seemed dismissive of their own cultural legacy. It’s the natural result of having to sit through every uninspired local movie and getting so weary that you take it all for granted.

Thus, Americans had to be told by postwar French auteurists that Hollywood’s popular cinema was full of artistic masterpieces. Meanwhile, those same French critics were awfully hard on their own national cinema, referred to derisively as “the cinema of quality”, and only now are historians re-evaluating much of that material.

Similarly, the upstarts of New German Cinema, in an understandable attempt to differentiate themselves from a compromised past, swept out “Opa’s kino” or “grandpa’s cinema”, and it’s been taking a while to examine that legacy. I think we’ve been slow to study Franco-era Spanish cinema for similar reasons, and pre-war Italian films. In Russia and China, there are times when it has been policy to avoid praising specific eras.

I fancy certain critics in Hong Kong or India have had to to be informed of the value of much of their blatantly commercial cinema by foreigners. Even today’s American reviewers are more comfortable dismissing mainstream Hollywood in praise of foreign films. Perhaps upstart critics in Brazil or Bengal shall one day inform Americans of the masterpieces of superhero cinema. This brings up the second factor: the passage of time tends to make things more interesting, not less, contrary to what people have long assumed about “dated” cinema.

In addition, a third factor is more specific to English culture, where it’s considered bad taste to toot your own horn. British cinema has been created by vulgar self-promoters like J. Arthur Rank (literally banging a gong) and brassy boots like Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger or Hammer’s Michael Carreras or the Kordas (imported Hungarians) or Anatole de Grunwald (imported Russian) or the imported Yanks of Amicus (it helps to be a bloody foreigner), and they faced whiffs of critical sniffery about the sort of thing that just isn’t done.

But then, there’s the work. The British Film Institute and others have been beavering away, restoring their country’s legacy, because it’s all they can do, poor dears, and the results are continually dropping our jaws and making us rewrite our impressions of drab British cinema. These thoughts are triggered by yet another handful of British postwar classics of the late 1940s and ’50s arriving on Blu-ray to put paid to the old libels. Let’s take the films in the order of public unleashing.about:blank

​Brighton Rock (1948) Director: John Boulting​

Richard Attenborough in Brighton Rock (1948) (IMDB)

This dark Catholic gangster thriller opens with a statement that might have been crafted by the Brighton Chamber of Commerce. We’re told that Brighton is a wonderful vacation spot an hour from London, but that between the wars it had “back alleys” of crime that caught police attention. “This is a story of that other Brighton — now happily no more” avers the prologue, as though such things are gone with the war, and a headline quickly establishes that the story takes place in June 1935.

Maybe so, but the extensive location shooting also makes the movie a documentary of postwar Brighton as a tatty pleasure-land for the lower and middle classes. This detailed and populous film, shot in expressive high-contrast black and white, provides a rich snapshot that seamlessly mixes location and studio work. It’s normal that studio sets provide all sorts of angles and shadows, but even the outdoor locations are presented with distortion and clamor.

Scripted by Graham Greene and Terence Rattigan from Greene’s 1938 novel, which he called one of his “entertainments”, the film is loaded with Catholic dialogue and symbolism, sometimes carefully underlined. For example, both the villainous Pinkie and his naïve girlfriend identify as Catholics and believers, with Pinkie declaring “Atheists don’t know what they’re talking about” and “Of course there’s a hell.”This recalls Mephistopheles’ famous statement in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus: “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.” Just to make sure every viewer makes the same connection, another character quotes this later in the film. And when Pinkie commits a significant malapropism by referring to a “suicide pax”, his background as an altar boy requires him to spell out that “pax” is Latin for “peace”. Such underlining could be heavy-handed but it’s mostly delightful for recovering English majors.

Wait, we’re forgetting the story. At 17, Pinkie Brown (Richard Attenborough) is a cold, affectless gangster who has assumed control of his little four-man racket since the death of a previous leader he loved. After being introduced in a moody, shadowy title portrait excerpted from later in the film, Pinkie makes his first appearance in the story as a pair of hands playing cat’s cradle. The hands are jutting up into frame, tangled in their string, foreshadowing the hands of Harry Lime poking up through the sewer grate in Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949), another thriller by Greene. These be-stringed hands might make us think he’s going to strangle someone, but he never does.

He does, however, push a journalist to his death from a thrill ride (called Dante’s Inferno!) in the movie’s most vivid and terrifying set piece. With glowing ghouls and ghosts flashing subjectively in the viewer’s face, this nerve-wracking and extravagantly edited sequence almost anticipates 3-D. For a moment, Brighton Rock turns into a horror film. Apparently, some English critics of the time found it objectionably horrible because of two razor-slashing scenes — that crossed a the line into depraved violence.about:blank

Aside from the details of Pinkie’s troubled relations with his three followers (we might call them disciples, although they don’t prove that disciplined, and there will be a Judas), the film details his relations between two diametrically opposed women who seem to fill him with horror.

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