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The Third Man (1949): 8/10

What a great movie, I just recorded it on the fly while I was looking for something to watch on TV. It has opened my eyes to classics.

Sorry...I just can't say anything right now, just I loved it...

It will be my first Criterion I ever own...

Top-Notch Thriller from the UK, with a wonderful cast, esp, Trevor Howard and Bernard Lee.

A Must See.

This is what I call a perfect movie. Perfect casting and acting, cinematography, story, music, and everything else you could posssibly think of. Yes sir, this movie has it all.

The basic story is simple. Rollo Martins (Joseph Cotton) is in Vienna to visit his best friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles). Martins discovers from one of Harry's fellow apartment tenants that Lime was hit by a car and he died instantaneously from the collision. Martins wants to get to the bottom of the case. He goes back and forth from person to person trying to figure out exactly what happened. He gets two different stories. One from the apartment tenant who intially told him of Harry's death, and another from one of Harry's friends, Kurtz. Kurtz says that Harry died only after he and another friend of Harrys carried Harry to the sidewalk, where Harry died before the ambulance came. The apartment tenant says that he saw three men carry Harry's body away. Now Martins wants to discover who the "third man" is.

It's a great one that has many twists and turns, and one of the most interesting, climatic endings to any movie I've ever seen. It mixes love, friendship, betrayal, and loyalty all in one intense package that will leave you wanting to see it again and again.

(****)

Although he didn't direct it, it's my favorite Orson Welles film. A very interesting and suspensful story about murder and deception. The only quibble I have is with the score; it didn't really fit the story. Highly recomended Film Noir.

The Third Man is cited by an awful lot of people as an example of a man of pure evil. Having finally watched it, I would say they're absolutely right.

Picture with me a recent episode of Law & Order. There's Jack McCoy, yelling away. (Jack always yells, even and especially at his own witnesses.) This time, he is yelling at a defendant who sold saline solution packaged as flu vaccine, and he reminds us of Harry Lime on the Ferris wheel, talking about those little specks below.

This is the most recent citing of the movie of which I am aware, but I'm sure there are others. The point is that Harry Lime really doesn't think of those specks as people. He is able to sell watered-down penicillin without a qualm because it's not like anyone real is getting hurt.

Not, you will note, that he's inclined to care about real people, either. His girlfriend doesn't matter. He kills several others so that he can escape responsibility for his actions. In short, Harry Lime is a sociopath.

I find, as often as not, that a sociopath makes for a less-interesting villain. After all, it's not really a surprise when they do something evil. Sociopaths are driven by pure self-interest, such as Harry Lime is here. It is far more interesting to me to watch someone torn by their behavior in a way that Harry Lime never could be.

Then again, in The Third Man, we are working with Orson Welles. This makes all the difference.