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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 80%
Worth A Look: 17.78%
Average: 2.22%
Pretty Bad: 0%
Total Crap: 0%
3 reviews, 27 user ratings
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| Third Man, The |
by Greg Muskewitz
"First-rate."
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Hardboiled amateur detective case set in Vienna, picking up almost as quickly as the hack writer protagonist (“The Lone Rider of Santa Fe,” “Oklahoma Kid”) arrives in town to meet his buddy; too late for that, but just in enough time to attend his funeral.As far as the international police (collectively Austrian, British, Russian and French) are concerned, it was an accident; but a porter’s account is enough to cause the writer to stir up the truth. Carol Reed’s film is richly textured in intrigue, suspense, and an authentic worldliness unexpected for something of its time. The details and set-up get the film up and going on concrete support, much unlike the stuff Joseph Cotton’s character would write, but on a scale that could so easily fall prey to the stylings of a potboiler. For one thing, The Third Man deals in discretions as a thematic device — not alone conducted by the vices of the characters and in their actions, but similarly through the mechanics of the plot. Reed, knowing that the film benefits from its unexpected developments, is able to keep the secrets, secret. That may mean, for example, that after the porter calls out to the writer for him to return in the evening to get more details when his own wife is gone, as he turns around certain to meet his death, Reed keeps the camera steady on his shocked face, allowing the audience’s panic to be emphasized by abstaining both from the on-screen appearance of the murderer and the absence of a death. (Another great set of scenes bookending the death of the porter has Cotton threatening him in order to get more information as a young Austrian boy searches for his ball, followed by the boy’s taunting songs towards the unsuspecting Cotton, who looks on in the crowd of Austrian bystanders, not understanding a word of it.) The direction remains swift throughout, stylized with Wellesian camera tilts, a suspenseful Ferris wheel ride and an adventurous chase in the un-zoned sewers. Granted, the film is more than half-a-century old and its secrets are well-known, but even with the foreknowledge of Orson Welles’ casting (and despite the search for the rumored third man in presence of the writer’s dead/murdered friend), one is never sure how and when it will come into play, and once it does, his performance (however brief) adds another whole dimension to the film. With Valli, Trevor Howard, Paul Hoerbiger and Ernst Deutsch.[Ne plus ultra.]
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link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=3415&reviewer=172
originally posted: 12/21/03 10:49:54
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USA
03-Sep-1949 (NR)
UK
N/A
Australia
N/A
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