The Third Man (1949)

An out of work pulp fiction novelist, Holly Martins, arrives in a post war Vienna divided into sectors by the victorious allies, and where a shortage of supplies has led to a flourishing black market. He arrives at the invitation of an ex-school friend, Harry Lime, who has offered him a job, only to discover that Lime has recently died in a peculiar traffic accident. From talking to Lime's friends and associates Martins soon notices that some of the stories are inconsistent, and determines to discover what really happened to Harry Lime.

"One of the amazing things about The Third Man," Steven Soderbergh once wrote, "is that it really is a great film, in spite of all the people who say it's a great film." He's right. It's one of the greatest, in fact: a witty, elegantly shot and steadfastly compassionate thriller suffused with the dreadful melancholia of the finest noir. It's set in Allied-occupied Vienna, where writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) pitches up at the invitation of his old chum Harry Lime. Except that when Martins arrives, Lime turns out to be dead. At least that's the prevailing wisdom at his funeral.

To say anything else about the mystery that Martins unravels would be to jeopardise some of the zesty surprises of this 64-year-old masterpiece. (Is there a statute of limitations on spoilers?) But then The Third Man is about more than plot. The morally fermented atmosphere of Vienna mapped out by Graham Greene's screenplay (based on his own story) is sustained beautifully by Robert Krasker's cinematography, with top notes of mischief introduced by Anton Karas's sprightly zither playing. An unassuming actor named Orson Welles also puts in an appearance, skulking in a doorway in one of the wittiest of all movie entrances, then delivering a speech full of humble horrors from the vantage point of a ferris wheel overlooking the city.

The key to the picture's genius is undoubtedly the mutually nourishing collaboration between Greene and the director Carol Reed. Seen in tandem with their other films together (The Fallen Idol, Our Man in Havana) there is a strong case to be made for them as one of the finest writer/director teams in cinema. Reed is not only alert to every nuance in Greene's writing but adept at finding pointed visual equivalents for his prose. Back to Soderbergh: "Disillusion, betrayal, misdirected sexual longing and the wilful inability of Americans to understand or appreciate other cultures — these are a few of my favourite things, and The Third Man blends them all seamlessly with an airtight plot and a location that blurs the line between beauty and decay."