Home Cinema Review
The Third Man on Blu-ray
Viennese Elegance: Review of 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. The brilliance of The Third Man is in its
simplicity and visual sophistication. Joseph Cotten plays Holly Martins, American pulp 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. Martins 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. 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 over a decade 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 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.
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