Start the week with a film: ‘The Third Man’ is a first-rate game of lies and shadows

Graham Greene’s The Third Man was originally a screen treatment for a Carol Reed film. Greene and Reed had collaborated on the film The Fallen Idol in 1948. They teamed up again the following year for The Third Man, which Green published as a novella in 1950. “The Third Man was never written to be read but only to be seen,” Greene wrote in the preface to the book.

The black-and-white classic is set in Vienna after World War II. Despite the grandeur of the Austrian capital’s Baroque buildings and its pretty cobblestoned streets, this is an untrustworthy place, full of shady types who lurk in hotel lobbies and use the vast network of sewers to smuggle goods and people.

American pulp writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) comes to Vienna to meet his old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles), only to be told that Harry has recently died in an accident. Convinced that Harry was killed, Martins starts poking around. Interpol officer Calloway (Trevor Howard) reveals Harry’s unsavoury past, while Harry’s devastated lover Anna (Alida Valli) insists on his innocence.

The movie can be rented on Prime Video.

The Third Man is justly regarded as one of the most visually memorable films ever made. Few directors have used architectural details, camera angles and looming shadows as expertly and thoughtfully as has Carol Reed.

But the British director isn’t just chasing striking lighting patterns and symmetrically correct compositions. Cinematographer Robert Krasker liberally uses canted angles to show a morally dubious world in which the truth is hard to sift from the lies. Martins is conflicted not only over Harry’s true identity, but also because of his feelings for Anna.

There are many exemplars of how Reed transforms Greene’s prose into dazzling cinema. The actors are lit and encased in tight close-ups like in a silent-era production or a German Expressionist film. The chase in the sewers is a masterly interplay of light, movement and compositional beauty.

One sequence is a reminder of Fritz Lang’s M (1931). A key eyewitness to Harry’s demise has himself been murdered. An angelic-looking boy points out Martins to a crowd, which then suspects Martins of being the killer and starts hounding him.

Another scene in which Calloway convinces Martins of Harry’s villainy takes place in a children’s hospital. Harry’s activities have led to deaths and lasting ailments. Rather than whip up emotion through suffering children, Carol Reed lines up teddy bears.

Orson Welles perfectly fits Graham Greene’s description of the delightfully named Harry Lime: Harry has a “look of cheerful rascality, a geniality, a recognition that his happiness will make the world’s day”, Greene writes. While Welles’s mastery over image and mood in his own films strongly influenced The Third Man, Carol Reed doesn’t descend into Wellesian grotesquery, instead balancing suspense, light humour and romance.

Music composer Anton Karas’s zither-heavy soundtrack has a leitmotif that suits the mystery surrounding Harry Lime. While there are numerous movies about intrigue and espionage in post WWII Europe, The Third Man is in a category by itself.