WHO was ”The Third Man”? You doubtless know the answer to the central mystery of Carol Reed’s black-and-white 1949 masterpiece, re-released for its 50th anniversary with 11 minutes of restored footage.
That knowledge doesn’t dim the post-war thriller’s pleasures. Familiarity heightens the viewer’s appreciation of Graham Greene’s shrapnel-sharp dialogue and the shrewd acting by Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles.
Savor the sinister spirals of the movie’s famed set pieces: the ferris wheel, stark against a gun-metal sky; the staircases twisting upwards to false leads and downwards to the sewer where ”The Third Man” achieves a feverish, haunting climax.
Just three notes into Anton Karas’ sublimely ridiculous zither score and you’re transported to a beautiful but damned Vienna that dominates its crumbled landscape like a violated dowager.
Enter American Holly Martins (Cotten). He arrives in partitioned Vienna on a ticket bought by boyhood chum Harry Lime (Welles). A dime-store-Western writer, Martins carries his cheap-fiction values like a ratty overcoat: Sheriffs best bad guys, the hero gets the girl, frontier justice prevails.
But post-war Vienna is a four-border town with no stomach for American frontier values. Intrigue, murder and a deadly trade in diluted penicillin dominate Greene’s plot.
Martins hits town the day of Lime’s funeral. As Holly suspects his friend’s death was no accident, he romances Lime’s ex (Alida Valli) and meets a British major (Trevor Howard) with an intimate knowledge of Lime’s unsavory career as a black marketeer.
In this dangerous climate, Martins’ naivete is an ill-afforded luxury, more dangerous than intentional cruelty, as useless as his romanticism.
Restored to its European version, the 11 additional minutes enhance the movie’s rhythm, its gut-felt sense of the dark, twisted beauty of man’s capacity for life and drive towards death. ”The Third Man,” with its lingering final shot of Cotten and Valli in ironic counterpoint to Karas’ zither, rivals – and bests – ”Casablanca.”