The greatest movie ever made celebrates its 75th anniversary this year and I’ll be watching it – for the umpteenth time – with appropriately fine fizz at hand. Sorry, what? Oh, come on, I’m talking about The Third Man. There’s no finer film. I thought everyone knew that.
You know, written by Graham Greene, directed by Carol Reed and set in a battered, broken, postwar Vienna. It stars Joseph Cotten as Holly Martins and Orson Welles as Harry Lime and there’s sterling support from Alida Valli, Trevor Howard, Bernard Lee and Wilfrid Hyde-White, whose comic cameo almost steals the show. Vienna is the real star of course, shot in brooding black and white at unsettling angles by Robert Krasker (who won an Oscar for his efforts), and you’ll recognise Anton Karas’s haunting ding de ding de ding de-ding dum dum dum zither music if nothing else.
I never knew the old Vienna before the war with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm
The Third Man is part thriller, part romance, part mystery, part comedy and wholly brilliant.
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