1949/UK
Director: Carol Reed.
Screenplay: Graham Greene, from his novel.
Cast: Orson Welles as Harry Lime, Joseph Cotten as Holly Martins, Alida Valli as Anna Schmidt, Trevor Howard as Major Calloway.
Cinematography: Robert Krasker.
Soundtrack (since everyone obsesses over this): Anton Karas.
The Third Man was filmed on location in Vienna and on a sound stage in London.
Vienna was in ruins after World War Two, controlled, as was Berlin, by the four allied powers, the US, Britain, France, and the USSR. The devastation wreaked during the war is emphasized in the opening of the film, as the condition of the city, moral as well as physical, is narrated for the viewer by the director, Carol Reed:
" I never knew the old Vienna before the war with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm. 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. Of course a situation like that does tempt amateurs."
All this accompanied by shots of baroque old buildings and rubble, with a body (an amateur?) floating in the Danube for good measure. 
Holly (Rollo in the book) Martins is a hack western writer who has come at his old college classmate's request to Vienna, apparently with an offer for employment. But Harry Lime has been run over and killed by a truck in front of his apartment. Martins is numb and shaken but embarks on a quest to learn all he can about the circumstances of his friend's death. He makes the acquaintance of Major Calloway (who he insists on calling "Callaghan") at Lime's funeral and accepts a ride back to town where they engage in the following conversation:
Martins; "It was a shame." Calloway; "What?" "Him dying like that." "Best thing that ever happened to him." "What are you trying to say?" "He was about the worst racketeer that ever made a dirty living in this city."
Martins takes deep offense at this speaking ill of the dead and becomes combative, upon which he is decked by Calloway's aide, Sergeant Paine. Immediately solicitous, Paine helps Martins up and offers this:
"Please be careful, sir. Written anything lately? I'm so glad to have met you, sir. I've read quite a few of your books. That's what I like about them, sir. You can pick them up and put them down any time."
Damning with faint praise, a fact not lost on Martins, who has no self-illusions, about his writing anyway. But Paine, being a fan, offers Martins as a speaker to a Mr. Crabbin (Wilfrid Hyde-White) whom they encounter at Martins' hotel. Crabbin heads the Cultural Re-education Society and explains to Holly;
This engagement offers a way for Martins to stay in Vienna so he accepts, showing his knack for getting in over his head. He meets Lime's neighbors, friends, and lover but finds more questions than answers about Harry's death.
There seems to have been an harmonic convergence at the scene of the tragedy of his doctor, his driver and two friends plus a mysterious third man, whom no one can identify, who helped carry the stricken Lime to the curb. Martins is too experienced with poorly written scenarios to believe this one.
Martins seeks out Harry's lover, Anna Schimdt (Alida Valli), who also expresses doubt as to the details of Harry's death, but seems not interested in pursuing the matter. Martins, in his blundering way, seeks out one of the two friends who carried Lime off the street, a Baron Kurtz, played wonderfully by Ernst Deutsch. His evil is palpable (my nine year old daughter, walking by, asked, "Is he a bad guy?").
Deutsch reminds me of another European noir stalwart, Victor Francen. They share a pompadour hairstyle, a haughty demeanor, cruel eyes, and a thin-lipped smile that offers no cheer. Krasker even manages, in a black and white movie, to give Deutsch the pallor of a ghost. The second friend, Popescu (Siegfried Breuer) is produced, and offers Martins some advice; "Everybody ought to be careful in a city like this."
Holly Martins is anything but careful and soon finds his sources falling like leaves. A witness to the accident is murdered and Anna is found to have a false passport and is to be "repatriated" to the Russian sector of Vienna.
At this point, in one of the most iconic scenes in any film noir, Martins spots the feet of someone spying on him from a darkened doorway across the street from Anna's apartment. His shouts of anger waken a woman who, in throwing open her window, illuminates the face of.......Harry Lime. But a car interrupts Martins' dash across the street and Lime escapes.
Martins goes to Calloway with the information and Lime's use of the storm sewer is discovered, but Lime is not found. Martins finally faces the reality of Lime's racketeering, involving the theft of penicillin from hospitals, the dilution and then resale of the drug on the black market, causing additonal trauma and death to the buyers.
Martins manages a rendezvous and comes to understand the full extent of Harry's perfidy. Lime is completely amoral, willing to kill children for profit, willing to kill to have a corpse to hide behind, even willing to turn Anna over to the Russians to ensure his safe haven in their quarter. Martins decides to play the Judas goat for Calloway, but Anna shows up and throws a wrench into the Major's plan to finish Lime's career once and for all......
The Third Man is remarkable for a number of reasons. Greene's dialogue sparkles with wit and irony, Krasker's use of lighting is textbook noir and the tilted camera gives a strong sense of the unsteadiness of life in occupied postwar Vienna.
The Third Man won awards in three different years because of a delay in its release in the US, taking the Grand Prize at Cannes in 1949, the Directors Guild Award in 1950 for Carol Reed, the BAFTA Best British Film the same year, and the Cinematography, Film Editing, and Director Oscars in 1951.
Anton Karas' zither did not win any awards, for good reason. It is the only weak point in the film. Often too loud and used to emphasize dramatic scenes so ham-handedly as to make it parodical, Karas' zither is an abomination in an othewise perfect example of noir style and storytelling. What a soundtrack there could have been with the classical music of Vienna as inspiration! 
