The Third Man (1949)

Directed by Carol Reed. Starring Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, and Orson Welles.

So many films today are made for kids- their styles are flashy and the ideas they present don't challenge us much. Little wonder then, that when I first saw this film in high school, it didn't exactly bowl me over. Reed's masterpiece, based on a book by Graham Greene, is manifestly a film for (and about) adults, people who have experienced setbacks and loss, who remember their youthful idealism and mourn its passing. It wasn't until a few years later, when I was in college and less certain of myself and my future, that I had grown into the film. I was in Vienna with a group from school, and I noticed a theatre near the Prater showing THE THIRD MAN, so I decided to see it again. Afterwards, shaken by how much more it had affected me, I walked over to the Prater and rode the famous Ferris wheel from the film, and thought not just about the film I had just seen, but my life as well. Of course the film was the same as when I had last seen it, but I had changed in the intervening years. Just about everything that can be said about this film's greatness (the immortal zither score, the black and white cinematography, the way it evokes the atmosphere of postwar Vienna, Harry Lime) has been said before, and by writers more eloquent than myself. What THE THIRD MAN represents to me above all else is my experience of seeing it in Vienna, the best moviegoing experience of my life to date.