A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #64: Carol Reed’s The Third Man.

With the likes of Carol Reed direct­ing, a Gra­ham Greene screen­play and Orson Welles, The Third Man, [1949] which I recently watched, is a very good movie. And since it was a Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion DVD, the good­ies are just as good.

The Third Man is clas­sic film noir, a tri­umph of black and white cin­e­matog­ra­phy and a palimpsest of post-​war schiz­o­phre­nia that grew into post­mod­ern antag­o­nism. This makes me think that post-​war and post­mod­ern might be used inter­change­ably. In any case, this film’s pro­tag­o­nist is a hack-​writer named Holly Mar­tins [Joseph Cot­ten], a heavy drinker and a bel­liger­ent Amer­i­can; ambigu­ous at best, who has come to Vienna to find his friend Harry Lime [Welles] who, every­one says, was hit by a car.

Vienna at this time is split between four coun­tries, France, Rus­sia, Great Britain and the United States. Rack­e­teer­ing abounds, and black mar­ket trade is about the only way to make a liv­ing. So Mar­tins, who has an infu­ri­at­ing man­ner of delib­er­ately mis­pro­nounc­ing everyone’s name, struts through Vienna as if, by right of his Amer­i­can­ity, the city should abase itself before him. He annoys the shit out of me. The female lead, Anna Schmidt [Alida Valli], isn’t really a femme fatale at all. The story twists and turns and I’ll say no more about it.

The cin­e­matog­ra­phy pulls no punches. Dutch angles abound, almost each scene has its own money shot, from deep-​focus shots from the top of a bridge, cav­ernous and labyrinthine sew­ers that play light every which way dur­ing a chase scene, cast shad­ows, cast light, this is a movie where black and white are engaged in just as much inter­play and sub­tlety as the city of Vienna itself. The act­ing, though at times a bit hammy, is also impres­sive in the amount of untrans­lated and pid­gin dia­logue that must exist in an German-​speaking city occu­pied by French, Rus­sians, British and Americans.

My only true prob­lem is with the edit­ing. There are sev­eral dissolve-​montages where a bunch of images are meant to con­vey advances in the plot. This made me at least have to review what I had just seen in order to make sense of where it fit in the film. What I’m say­ing is, the mon­tages did more to stop the plot than advance it. Also, eye­line matches and matches on action were often hic­coughy. This could very well not be the edi­tors fault, per­haps there was no footage appro­pri­ate enough to merge seamlessly.

In clos­ing, the open­ing cred­its are the best I’ve ever seen in a film. A close-​up of zither strings being played in the back­ground as they roll. It was hyp­notic, mes­mer­iz­ing, and all that jazz.

P.S. The Cri­te­rion trans­fer gives you color bars so that you can adjust the bright­ness and con­trast for opti­mal viewing.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Michael Wilm­ing­ton.