A while ago I ordered a DVD of The Third Man, since I've been reading a bit of Graham Greene lately and I'd heard a lot of good things about this movie. It's generally seen as one of the best, if not the best, film noir. As with many pop culture touchstones, I first encounter its legacy on The Pinky and the Brain many years ago, when they did a parody of it in one of their episodes ("It was in Vienna just after the war. I don't remember which war, but it was right after it...").
The Third Man's plot suffers from a case of what TV Tropes would call a 'Rosebud': the fact that the main plot twist is common knowledge because of the movie's notoriety (and, like the original Rosebud, Orson Welles is involved). We all know that Harry Lime isn't actually dead because he is due to appear and give him famous speech about cuckoo clocks (though Welles is listed in the opening credits, so perhaps it was never that big a secret).
The movie has several great performances, starting with Cotten as the 'very American' (in the worlds of Peter Bogdanovich) lead man, Alida Valli as Anna, Trevor Howard as Calloway, and an enjoyable comic turn from Bernard Lee (later M to the Connery, Lazenby, and Moore incarnations of James Bond) as Calloway's batman, a sergeant who is quite a fan of Holly's writing. The performance that everyone always ends up talking about is Welles, however, in what amounts to an extended cameo (two scenes, the second with basically no dialogue).
Criterion's DVD version provides an extensive selection of extras, including several commentaries, features on the film's production, and, best of all, several older segments that include an interview with Greene on his career, and some old newsreels spotlighting the Vienna of the period, and showing the level of detail that Reed and company were able to capture. One of the newsreels is an overview of the Viennese sewer patrol that participate in the film's climax, explaining how they work.
The Third Man's plot suffers from a case of what TV Tropes would call a 'Rosebud': the fact that the main plot twist is common knowledge because of the movie's notoriety (and, like the original Rosebud, Orson Welles is involved). We all know that Harry Lime isn't actually dead because he is due to appear and give him famous speech about cuckoo clocks (though Welles is listed in the opening credits, so perhaps it was never that big a secret).
The movie has several great performances, starting with Cotten as the 'very American' (in the worlds of Peter Bogdanovich) lead man, Alida Valli as Anna, Trevor Howard as Calloway, and an enjoyable comic turn from Bernard Lee (later M to the Connery, Lazenby, and Moore incarnations of James Bond) as Calloway's batman, a sergeant who is quite a fan of Holly's writing. The performance that everyone always ends up talking about is Welles, however, in what amounts to an extended cameo (two scenes, the second with basically no dialogue).
Criterion's DVD version provides an extensive selection of extras, including several commentaries, features on the film's production, and, best of all, several older segments that include an interview with Greene on his career, and some old newsreels spotlighting the Vienna of the period, and showing the level of detail that Reed and company were able to capture. One of the newsreels is an overview of the Viennese sewer patrol that participate in the film's climax, explaining how they work.
