Orson Welles makes one of the greatest entrances in film history in THE THIRD MAN
THE THIRD MAN (Carol Reed, 1949)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Friday, March 14, 7:00, and Monday, March 17, 8:00
Series continues through April 20
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
Carol Reed’s thriller is quite simply the most entertaining film you’re ever likely to see. Set in a divided post-WWII Vienna amid a thriving black market, The Third Man is heavy in atmosphere, untrustworthy characters, and sly humor, with a marvelous zither score by Anton Karas. Joseph Cotten stars as Holly Martins, an American writer of Western paperbacks who has come to Vienna to see his old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles), but he seems to have shown up a little late. While trying to find out what happened to Harry, Martins falls for Harry’s lover, Anna (Alida Valli); is told to get out of town by Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) and Sergeant Paine (Bernard “M” Lee); meets a stream of Harry’s more interesting, mysterious friends, including Baron Kurtz (Ernst Deutsch) and Popescu (Siegfried Breuer); and is talked into giving a lecture to a literary club by old Mr. Crabbin (Wilfrid Hyde-White). Every scene is a finely honed work of art, filled with long shadows, echoing footsteps, dripping water, and unforgettable dialogue about cuckoo clocks and other strangeness. SPOILER: The shot in which Lime is first revealed, standing in a doorway, a cat brushing by his feet, his tongue firmly in cheek as he lets go a miraculous, knowing smile, is one of the greatest single moments in the history of cinema.
The city of Vienna is a character all its own in THE THIRD MAN
The Third Man is screening March 14 & 17 as part of the MoMA series “Vienna Unveiled: A City in Cinema,” being held in conjunction with Carnegie Hall’s Vienna: City of Dreams festival, in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Austrian Film Museum. The series continues through April 20 with such other Viennese-related fare as Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession, Max Ophüls’s Liebelei, and Josef von Sternberg’s Dishonored. “I never knew the old Vienna before the war, with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charms,” Reed says in the opening narration of The Third Man. “Constantinople suited me better. I really got to know it in the classic period of the black market. We’d run anything if people wanted it enough . . . and had the money to pay.” As much as The Third Man is about friendship, love, trust, betrayal, music, and loyalty, it’s also about Vienna itself.