Hacker Cinema
The Third Man
1949 · Film · 105 min
Directed by Carol Reed
In postwar Vienna, Austria, Holly Martins, a writer of pulp Westerns, arrives penniless as a guest of his childhood chum Harry Lime, only to learn he has died. Martins develops a conspiracy theory after learning of a "third man" present at the time of Harry's death, running into interference from British officer Major Calloway, and falling head-over-heels for Harry's grief-stricken lover, Anna.
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38 comments on Hacker News
Yeah - listen to the narrator in the opening on the classic Orson Welles film The Third Man (1949) - he says he never cared much for Vienna before the War, preferring the scene in Constantinople instead.
Ebisu has the "Harry Lime" theme from "The Third Man"? Wasn't expecting to recognise any... I wonder who was a fan of that film.
The Third Man is another example. Graham Greene wrote a treatment before he wrote the screenplay. The treatment, which wasn't written with publication in mind, was later published as a novella, and it differs from the film in several notable ways, because Greene and the directors changed things during the writing of the screenplay and the principal making of the film.
My son and I just watched our way through the Bond movies, and I remember this exactly. Was it “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” or one of the later Roger Moore gigs? I remember that one in particular was lit and shot exceptionally poorly.
This isn’t a matter of time period, it’s skill and attention. At the time of the Bond films it was well-known how to do good lighting, and people had been doing it for decades. Contrast the crappy Bond films with any beautiful old movie, like “The Third Man” or “Citizen Kane,” still legendary for great cinematography.
It's always nice to see a list which includes movies I haven't watched or heard of. Alas I suspect many are hard to find now, the streaming services don't show much interest in picking up the classics.
My sub-list:
Film I'm pleasantly surprised to see in the top 10: Mulholland Dr.
Film I'm not going to complain about: 2001. It's impact can't be denied even if the last bit drags
Film I'm happy to see recognized: Yi Yi
Films I found underwhelming:
-- Melancholia
-- Tree of Life
Films I'd forgotten about that I now have to watch again:
-- Dr. Strangelove
-- Playtime
-- Yi Yi
-- 8 1/2
Film I would have ranked higher: The Third Man
Do you know that first link's security certificate fails and the website is under construction. I'd love to visit the museum when I'm in Vienna. Not that it will happen in the very near future, but I plan on revisiting Vienna one day (to watch The Third Man in that old cinema again :).
Vienna, a city synonymous with shady cold war intrigue...
If you are curious what that was like, I highly recommend Orson Welles' film The Third Man, which is set in post-war Vienna. You can even visit the sewers where part of the film takes place. (I recommend it, but be aware that it isn't fancy.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Man
https://www.wien.gv.at/english/environment/sewer-system/third-man/
The movie The Third Man was (in part) about a guy who sold fake (diluted) penicillin in post-WW2 Vienna.
Thinking about what was possible to make in 1982, it's pretty amazing. It's an absolute classic, up there with the best of the noirs (the actual film noirs), such as The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity and The Third Man; the logical answer to the Neo Noir Body Heat the year before. It's like a legacy moving onto such things as Ghost in the Shell and even The Matrix.
> Orson Welles's The Third Man
I'm not sure if you were implying some kind of authorship but it was written by Graham Greene and directed by Carol Reed.
Surprised there is no mention of Dashiell Hammett, a contemporary of Christie's. He wrote The Maltese Falcon in 1930, introducing the world to Sam Spade, an interesting contrast to Hercule Poirot. The interwar period certainly was the golden age of detective and mystery novels, whether they were more in line with the Christie formula or followed a more hard-boiled, American style.
I wonder to what degree the novels of that period informed the more paranoid, Cold War-era novels and films after WWII. John le Carré and Ian Fleming obviously come to mind, but Orson Welles's The Third Man and Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity are also great explorations of the postwar noir genre.
I'm sure there are essays about how it's all connected, and how it can probably be traced back to early mysteries like Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, but I haven't found anything yet that charts the history of the genre and explains the relative stability of its tropes and motifs over time.
Special effects are not bad per se. The problem is that these days, a lot of movies use FX as a substitute for storytelling.
Just consider Blade Runner: It is just stunning, visually, but it uses these visuals to tell a story, not to distract from a lack of story.
That being said, I agree: Given the choice between good storytelling and good visuals, I'll take a good story any day.
And while we're in this era, let's not forget about "The Third Man", "The Maltese Falcon", or "Double Indemnity".
The Naked City by Jules Dassin is a really good police procedural. If you like stuff like Law & Order, this is the progenitor.
The Third Man is classic, classic noir. Between the on location shooting in Vienna, fantastic performances by Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles, and really distinctive cinematography, it's just stunning.
A Man Escaped. To quote Godard, "He is the French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music". If you like simple, but beautiful films, watch Bresson. A Man Escaped makes all other prison break films, with their endless plot twists and convolutions, seem utterly pointless. Instead Bresson focuses on the character, the drama and the methodical process of breaking out.
There's a line I ran across from the movie The Third Man where the character Harry Lime says:
> In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed—but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Man
12 Angry Men
----
Walkabout
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Koyaanisqatsi
A profound movie with no words except the chanting of a Hopi word, meaning "life out of balance", or "a way of life that calls for another way of life".
----
My Dinner With Andre
"We're bored. We're all bored now. But has it ever occurred to you, Wally, that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now, may very well be a self perpetuating, unconscious form of brainwashing created by a world totalitarian government based on money and that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks, and its not just a question of individual survival, Wally, but that somebody who's bored is asleep, and somebody who's asleep will not say no?"
----
The Third Man
(Long shot from Martins' eye line of the fairground far below and the people now on it.)
"Would you feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you £20,000 for every dot that stopped - would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man......free of income tax. It's the only way to save money nowadays."
Fun fact: My grandfather was a sound recordist on location for The Third Man. One day Reed told him to just grab his gear and come with him to the restaurant after they had finished shooting for the day. IIRC it was quite late, and it was a nightmare to record because of all the background noise from the restaurant. Probably another reason they re-recorded later.
They shot the Ferris Wheel over the course of a whole day, going around and around and around whilst there was light. The cars were quite small for filming, so Reed, the cameraman and my grandfather were pressed up against the other side as far back as they could. He would recall it as being a grueling day.
I don't know if they ended up re-shooting that later, because in the film the background out the windows looks projected. He never watched any films he worked on, so might not have known.
He had so many stories from that shoot, which was odd because he didn't like talking about work, so I got the impression it was one of his favorite location shoots.
As a side note, last time I was in Vienna, there was an old cinema playing the Third Man every day.
One of my favorite movies of all time. So much so that I own it in Blu-ray and when I visited Vienna I took a ride on the famous ferris wheel.
The night images are amazing and they spent so much time spraying the streets every night with water to get that look.
I'm also so glad the director fought hard to avoid the typical movie score that was pushed by Hollywood producers and went for the iconic sound of the zither [0]. Which all happened by accident when Reed was having a dinner and hears Karas playing the instrument. The choice of this instrument not only made the movie but also change the fortune of Karas who was playing the instrument [1].
Along with the best improvised movie lines which I would include the Bladerunner I would also include Orson Wells' line about the Swiss and the cuckoo clock.
As a bit of a movie buff, I have to agree with Soderbergh's comment about the movie keeping the consistent tone. So many movies with great potential lose their tone and miss that quintessential part of the movie that makes them a classic. The Third Man is a classic and should be a must watch on anyone's list who likes the cinema.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oEsWi88Qv0
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Karas
I enjoy this movie a lot, and thought I knew most of the fun tidbits - when Reed points out that the soundtrack was designed as a counterpoint to the action on the screen:
> For example, in the cat scene, I asked Karas to play a few sort of walking notes while the cat crossed the street and then, as it looked at Harry’s shoe, ascending chords, which break into “The Third Man Theme” when it finally sees Harry and we hold on the cat’s little face.
It really intrigued me, makes me want to rewatch the movie to listen for things like that!
That's me!
Why?
So many more titles are on DVD than streaming. Many many more.
Try watching anything by Rainer Fassbinder on streaming: does not exist, but are on DVD. But that number is dropping due to licensing issues, just like streaming. My DVD queue has movies saved in "unknown" that I've actually SEEN from Netflix back in 2002 when I first subscribed.
Examples of DVDs from Netflix ca. 2002-2005 that I watched which no longer exist:
Lumiere and Company
The Third Man
The House that Dripped Blood
Lies
Crimes of Passion
Sadly my "unknown availability" list is growing.
I understand the sunk cost fallacy, but I agree that I'm not sure this is the greatest example of it.
Or maybe I relate to films in a completely different way from anyone else.
For example, gaping plot holes or impossible character motivations often turn me off. But I love apparent inconsistencies that are fully explained by the end.
I basically want filmmakers to convince me they put more thought into their film in the months of making it than I could in the hours of watching it.
Or... some of my favorite films are a slow burn that suddenly clicks into an intense ending that surprises you by raising the intensity far above the setup. The Third Man, Hara-kiri, M, Oldboy, The Hidden Blade.
By either of these criteria, it can be incredibly difficult to know whether a movie is good or terrible in the beginning. The extreme best and worst could begin very similarly, but they'll end in completely different places.
A bit like if Croesus and Solon were just film critics.
> Small experiment: searching for "movie old man balloons" on Google and Bing.
Your experiment's results are not repeatable. When I do that here:
* Bing gives me 8 pages about Up (including that spoof site), one about Danny Deckchair, and a page about a magician who re-creates old movies with balloons.
* Google gives me 13 pages about Up (also including that spoof site), a book of best movie scenes on its page for The Third Man, and an article from The Rotarian from 1948.
Of course, some knowledge of how these things work teaches that this is a terrible methodology, given that it does not account for the fact that both Bing and Google tailor their search results to the searcher. One should at the very minimum log out of one's Google and Bing accounts, which you made no mention of doing.
Dreyfus was my favorite Berkeley professor, and taught my favorite undergrad course, Existentialism in Literature and Film, in which he introduced me to Kierkegaard, Camus, Marguerite Duras's Hiroshima mon amour, and Graham Greene's The Third Man. His Heidegger class was also great, and there he also introduced us to Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I loved his lectures and he was also a nice guy... a lot nicer and more approachable than his also famous colleague John Searle.
Right, and you played it in your formative years. I can watch a movie like "The Third Man" or "12 Angry Men" or "Scaramouche" in my adult years, made decades before I was born, even though I was reared on more flashy stuff, and find it as much as if not more satisfying than what I had encountered before. Could you get a 7 year old today who's had a couple of years of XBox 360 and Wii under his belt to enjoy SMB on the NES more than just to play it for 3 minutes to examine it as an artifact of another age? Even when he's older and can understand the evolution of video games?
It's an amusing little experiment but there are a number of possible factors the person running it didn't consider that, I think, are more likely than his actual conclusions.
First, there is the possibility that Casablanca is not actually a very good movie. The author of this article claims that Casablanca is "the most famous movie in the history of film." That may have been correct a generation or two ago, but in the decades since Star Wars, I think "the most famous movie" is Star Wars.
I would agree that Casablanca is a very famous movie, and a fun movie, but having seen it in the theater, I didn't think it was actually a great movie. It is a relatively small story, and lightweight, and trivializes its period and events. It's relatively low in drama, and it relies heavily on the (at the time) star power of its leads, and aside from some clever catch-phrases, it is talky and the dialogue does drag.
Just talking movies of the 1940s, I would argue that Citizen Kane (1940), The Great Dictator (1940), The Third Man (1949), The Big Sleep (1946), Rope (1948), and Miracle on 34th Street (1947) are all better movies, more artfully filmed and more memorable, although perhaps some are more kitschy and Corny than Casablanca.
Certainly, one could expect that people reading the screenplay "slush pile" for agencies ought to be familiar enough with the history of film to recognize the story of Casablanca or at least some of the catch-phrases. But I think the "gatekeepers" are actually often the most junior, least knowledgeable folks in the industry.
Wow, I must be really bored today to write all that... eating my lunch and I can't be bothered to do anything but read Hacker News : P
To be fair, it's a quote from a film noir [1], not one of the interviewees.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Man
I'm not sure I'm able to visualize this correctly. Let's say we have an array of strings containing the top 20 movies from Rotten Tomatoes:
The Wizard of Oz The Third Man Citizen Kane All About Eve Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) Modern Times A Hard Day's Night The Godfather E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial Metropolis It Happened One Night Singin' in the Rain Laura The Adventures of Robin Hood Inside Out Repulsion Boyhood North by Northwest King Kong Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
What would this data structure look like?
> 1903 and 65 years later landed on the moon.
65 years and Two World Wars later...
This quote [1] from the movie 'The Third man' might be relevant.
>in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock?
[1]http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041959/quotes?item=qt0359443
"Skin tones look polished and movement is stabilized, giving the image a sharpness that was not originally there."
That actually sounds wonderful to me! The Third Man is probably my favorite film. I always noticed the jitter during the opening credits (zither strings twitching around the frame) and I'm pretty sure Carol Reed would have preferred it to be steady there. I certainly will. I can't wait to see this. As for film historians, hopefully the digitized source will be available somewhere, so they can have the scratches and jitter, if they want them.
If you are ever in Vienna I highly recommend taking the underground Third Man sewer-tour and then afterwards go see the film at the Burg Kino which screens it daily.
https://www.drittemanntour.at/en/index.html
http://www.burgkino.at/film_detail.phtml?fil_id=4&per=now
The Third Man is one great movie. As the saying goes, they don't make 'em like that anymore...
For me, it was quite the opposite - when I saw Casablanca for the first time, I remembered all the scenes from it being parodied or quoted, and I thought, "so that is where those came from".
The same happened to me watching The Wizard of Oz. Suddenly I remembered all those scenes from the Simpsons which I did not get before and was like, "now I get it".
There is an episode of Star Trek DS9 where a character almost literally quotes the speech at the end of The Third Man (given, incidentally, by Orson Welles). Had I not seen The Third Man, I would have thought it was just a stupid monologue, but knowing where it came from changed the tone and gravity of that scene completely.
I really like 'Citizen Kane', but to be honest, when it comes to films involving Orson Welles, by far my favourite is 'The Third Man'.
Though many of Orson's scenes he isn't actually in as he refused to leave the hotel until they tempted him out with a magician, so he is often represented by shadow.
If we are going to speculate, perhaps Hastings is not dead, maybe he faked his own death to be with Elvis or the martians, and escape the government (I just watched a movie with Orson Wells - the third man - about this) Maybe the government faked his death like they did Osama Bin Laden for whatever reason? (So they can torture and restrain him and no one will know or care)
If you do a search for Economic Hitman Perkins, he was former NSA type who went around the global trying to get political leaders to do oil contracts and such that benefitted the west, if they didn't play ball, CIA Jackals were sent in to assassinate the people, Perkins said the only reason he decided to expose this later on was because he didn't want his daughter growing up in that kind of society where people are murdered for thier beliefs and trying to help thier citizens. Maybe like the comments below, Perkins is just a plant trying to "enhance" the fear of the CIA/NSA to get more people to respect them and they never killed anyone or very few of the deaths that are attributed to them. In the end, what does any of it all really matter? We all have a limited time to exist, and my friend Weev says to have fun, get lots of LULZ, face the madness of this world with Absurdity. Frank Sinatra said to leave them laughing when you go, take us out Frankie...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVVmig6lR0w
As long as Netflix keeps streaming Korean crime movies and Japanese dystopia movies and Scandinavian crime/thriller movies and The Third Man, I could give a rats ass about Starz.
Orson Wells came up with that line in the motion picture _The Third Man_. The screenwriters didn't come up with it. The author of the original novel didn't come up with it either (though he liked it). There was a space of time in the film that needed to be filled, so Orson Wells filled it.
The full quote is:
Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love — they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
This whole question of dealing with learning something surprising about a person you know and like is the subject of my favorite movie of all time: The Third Man. I highly recommend it.
So many times! With really great movies, they get better every time I watch them. It's A Wonderful Life, The Third Man, Casablanca, and The Godfather, to name a few. Of course I want to see them again. They may not change, but I see new things and understand them more completely every time I watch them. Like all great art, good movies deserve multiple viewings. I love rereading good books for the same reason. I can't imagine only looking at a statue like the Laocoön just once, why would I feel different about a film?