The Third Man

Of all the movies I have seen, this one most completely embodies the romance of going to the movies. Read full review

Throughout the film the sense of Vienna as a frazzled echo of its glorious past is underpinned by Reed's greatest trouvaille – the discovery of Anton Karas's zither melodies, used as the only musical accompaniment. Half-jaunty, half-melancholic, they epitomise, like the film itself, a world gone sadly to seed. Read full review

This will haunt you. The style, the plot, the character and of course ...that tune... Read full review

A noir classic. Read full review

A triumph of disparate tones, colors and intentions. Like many, I have loved this thriller of conscience and betrayal most of my moviegoing life...Its brand of romantic fatalism is particularly seductive to teenage males, I think, and those who never fully recover from that moviegoing state of being. Read full review

Mr. Reed has brilliantly packaged the whole bad of his cinematic tricks, his whole range of inventive genius for making the camera expound. His eminent gifts for compressing a wealth of suggestion in single shots, for building up agonized tension and popping surprises are fully exercised. His devilishly mischievous humor also runs lightly through the film, touching the darker depressions with little glints of the gay or macabre. [3 Feb 1950, p.29] Read full review

It's an exciting experience, dazzling and entertaining and thought-provoking. I saw it at Cinema 21 last week and immediately wanted to see it again. I couldn't, so I started researching and read everything I could about it. It's truly great. Read full review

Supporting characters turn in excellent portrayals. Camera work on an exceptionally high plane, and in his painstaking direction Carol Reed lives up to his high reputation. Read full review

The Third Man finally endures because it offers a simple thing that so many modern films neglect: the power of story...Revolutionary film noir with a clutch of stunning central turns. Read full review

What has perhaps been lost over the years, however, is the cultural freshness and vitality of Reed’s masterpiece...The Third Man is important not just because of its technique but because of its theme. Read full review

Although he’s only on screen for a fraction of the film’s running time, Lime (Welles) stands out as one of the screen’s most chilling embodiments of the banality of evil, and a perfect stand-in for Third Man’s vision of moral breakdown in post-WWII Europe. Read full review

One of the best-ever examples of film noir to come out of all of Europe. The Third Man has all the right ingredients: an engaging, twisty storyline (written by Graham Greene); one of the most diabolical and charismatic villains ever to grace the screen; crisp, innovative directing (by the underrated Carol Reed); a score (by Anton Karas) that it as unforgettable as it is unconventional; and cinematography (by Robert Krasker) that uses the black-and-white medium to its fullest. Not only is The Third Man a darling of the critics, but it has been embraced with glee by the general populace for more than five decades. Read full review

It’s a film — and a city — to get lost in, and it’ll haunt you afterward, like a face you thought you recognized under a streetlamp, before it disappeared. Read full review

The Third Man is best seen as his romantic fantasy; we’d have to wait decades before another awkward scribbler, also a fish out of water, plunged helplessly into a misadventure. His name was Barton Fink. Read full review

A gripping, beautifully structured picture and a tour de force from British director Carol Reed...It's hard to choose just one scene to sum up this poetic thriller, but the legendary scene on the ferris wheel may best represent its perfect blend of great writing, acting, and directing. The fadeout, too, is unforgettable. Read full review

Riddled with post-war despair, The Third Man is one of the great British movies. The zither music, the noirish cinematography, the taut writing and the raft of excellent performances combine in an engrossing thriller that matches America's finest. Read full review

Krasker’s camera reveals a dank, matte, defeated city — so dully vivid as to be a character unto itself — except that this Vienna becomes something altogether different seen at night or underground. In that velvety shadowscape, even rubble and sewage look glamorous. Read full review

Welles’s presence, so radiant, so enthralling, so unapologetically egotistical, is all the more wondrous when you consider that Harry Lime was nearly played by someone else. Read full review

But the thing about Carol Reed's 1949 The Third Man was that no matter how many times I saw it over the years its magic never failed. Its sophisticated, world-weary glamour never lost its allure. The movie only got richer as my own experiences got richer. I kept discovering dark new delights, and the classic moments remained every bit as classic. Read full review

The Third Man remains among the most consummate of British thrillers: Reed and Greene’s sardonic vision of smiling corruption is deliciously realised with superb location work, a roster of seasoned Viennese performers and the raised eyebrow of Anton Karas’ jaunty zither score. Read full review

A sharp, exciting thriller that beautifully captures a dispirited Europe nowhere near recovered from WWII, Carol Reed's The Third Man is one of those miraculous films that work on every level. Read full review

The Third Man is a film where everything works: script, direction, the performances of Welles, Cotten, Trevor Howard (the cynical police major) and Alida Valli (the enigmatic traveler), Robert Krasker's flamboyantly tilted black-and-white cinematography and the unforgettably spare and haunting zither score by Anton Karas. [5 Sept 1996, p.6]

The Third Man is so elegant, tiny and perfect that it feels more like a watch than a movie: It should have been directed by Patek Phillipe. [9 July 1999, p.C01]

It is as breathtaking a moral thriller today as it was in 1949. [16 July 1999, p.10]

The Third Man has so many captivating elements that it's often thought of as a romantic movie. Maybe that's the result of Welles' involvement in a radio show in which his movie character, Harry Lime, became significantly more heroic, or the television series in which Michael Rennie took over the role. [30 July 1999, p.H1]

Greene's wonderful dialogue, often oddly contradictory, adds to that tantalizing sense of imbalance. [5 Aug 1999, p.G3]

It isn't easy when you're up against the likes of Reed, writer Graham Greene, and producer David O. Selznick, but Welles still manages to dominate this 1949 film, both as an actor and as a stylistic influence. What's missing is the Welles content. Read full review

Orson Welles' portrait of the friend, Harry Lime, is a study of corruption - evil, witty, unreachable.

An admirable film, not a great one -- yet. It drags a bit.[Restored version]

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...It isn’t so much that The Third Man is a bad movie—far from it. But it’s far from being a great one, too. Read full review