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Tripwire Reviews The Third Man 75th Anniversary 4K Restored Edition
You Don’t Know Harry
Tripwire’s editor-in-chief Joel Meadows reviews StudioCanal’s The Third Man 75th Anniversary Edition out from 4 November on Blu-ray and DVD…
The Third Man
Director: Carol Reed
Starring: Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles, Alida Valli
Arguably one of the greatest British films of the twentieth century (along with films like Lawrence of Arabia and Peeping Tom), The Third Man gets a 4K restored Blu-ray and DVD release for its 75th anniversary. The brilliance of The Third Man is in its simplicity and visual sophistication. Joseph Cotten plays Holly Martins, American pulp western writer, who comes to a war-damaged Vienna just after the Second World War to take his friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) up on his invitation to visit, except that Harry Lime seems to have been killed in an arbitrary car crash. Martins get embroiled in Lime’s life when he discovers that his friend was actually a trafficker in fake penicillin. He also begins to wonder if Lime is actually dead after all too and he begins to dip deeper into the demi-monde of Vienna.
Welles is hardly on screen but when he is, he makes his presence known and dominates the scenes he is in, wonderfully understated as the enigmatic Lime. Lime casts a huge shadow over the film as the dramatic engine of The Third Man. Cotten works well as the innocent abroad and Harry’s girlfriend Anna (Alida Valli) is suitably interesting as the female lead here, with secrets of her own to hide.
Based on Graham Greene’s novella of the same name, the degraded elegance of Vienna and Reed’s brilliance as a director come to the fore thanks to the extra clarity of the newly restored version. The chase through the sewers that concludes the film is still one of the most iconic scenes in cinema and it is allowed to shine here in 4K glory. The documentary Shadowing The Third Man, narrated by John Hurt and included here and made two decades ago, does lend some extra colour and context to the film (you discover that the film went up in smoke just as they had completed it and they had to piece it together from the negative). The other extras are fascinating here too like a short video featuring directors like Martin Scorsese and John Styles espousing their love for the work although some are for completists only.
The Third Man is still a work of rare genius and whether you’re returning to it like a familiar friend or coming to it like a new discovery, it is still a magnificent work of cinematic art that deserves to be available in this enhanced format.
Here’s the film’s restored version trailer
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